YouTube is giving some creators a 30-day fix-it period before terminating their channels

YouTube is giving some creators a little grace after flagging their channels for violations of its spam policy.

Historically, creators who are flagged for spam–a broad category that includes everything from viewbotting, to posting “low-effort, repetitive” comments or polls, to promoting get-rich-quick schemes, to mass-reposting content from other people–get their channels immediately terminated. That means all of a channel’s videos, subscribers, comments, and of course revenue are gone. Creators can appeal this decision, but their channel will remain offline while they go through the process and hope for a better outcome.

The new path YouTube is testing will give them a chance to fix the (alleged) errors of their ways and get their channels back up.

Under the new process, once a channel is flagged, it will be removed from public viewership–but will not be deleted.

Instead, “it will enter a 30-day locked period and the channel owner will be notified via email and in YouTube Studio on desktop,” Team YouTube wrote in a Help Center post. “Certain actions, such as uploading new videos or posting comments, will not be available while your channel is locked.”

During the 30-day lock, creators have three options:

1. Fix or remove videos YouTube thinks violated its spam policy.
2. Remove all videos from their channel, which will immediately unlock it, sending it public again.
3. Submit an appeal. YouTube will review the flag (hopefully with an actual human moderator) and see if there was truly a policy violation that merits such strict action.

Team YouTube said that if a creator chooses option 1, submits their edited channel for approval, and is rejected, they can still take option 2 as long as they’re within the 30-day window. Using option 2 at any point in the process will allow creators to “start fresh while keeping [their] subscribers, channel handle, and YPP status,” the team explained.

YouTube did not say why it’s implementing this change, but we wonder if it has something to do with its spam policy…

Here’s the section of the policy that has us wondering: “Automated or synthetic mass-production: Using automated tools or AI to churn out high volumes of similar content with minimal changes. While testing out new creation tools or posting a few variations of a video is ok, we don’t allow use of these tools to flood our platform with repetitive content. This includes coordinated mass-production and technical manipulation to bypass filters or trick viewers.”

Examples of violators include channels that “use the exact same background music and repetitive AI generated imagery across many videos, with each video reading out an AI-generated script.”

This policy sounds good, but YouTube’s attempts to curb AI slop (even as Google dumps enough money into the AI bubble to keep itself in the red for the last two quarters) have backlashed onto genuine creators.

A number of creators–like stop-motion channel Tiny Grandma–have had their content incorrectly flagged as AI and demonetized. The folks behind Tiny Grandma reached out to us here at Tubefilter when YouTube stripped their monetization, and we were able to connect them directly with humans at YouTube. But what about creators who can’t get the hookup, and instead are stuck with automated responses?

This new process might help address that concern–but that’s if the process becomes widely used.

Team YouTube does mention that the 30-day grace period is an experiment, and that only certain channels are eligible. We don’t know what the eligibility requirements are–and, as always with YouTube experiments, it’s possible this one won’t ever make it to live service for all users. Seems like it would be nice if it did, though.

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