deceptive content

“Zero warnings”: Longtime YouTuber rails against unexplained channel removal

censorship, content moderation, deceptive content, online bans, Policy, spam, youtube / Mike M. / February 4, 2025

Artemiy Pavlov, the founder of a small but mighty music software brand called Sinesvibes, spent more than 15 years building a YouTube channel with all original content to promote his business’ products. Over all those years, he never had any issues with YouTube’s automated content removal system—until Monday, when YouTube, without issuing a single warning, abruptly deleted his entire channel.

“What a ‘nice’ way to start a week!” Pavlov posted on Bluesky. “Our channel on YouTube has been deleted due to ‘spam and deceptive policies.’ Which is the biggest WTF moment in our brand’s history on social platforms. We have only posted demos of our own original products, never anything else….”

Officially, YouTube told Pavlov that his channel violated YouTube’s “spam, deceptive practices, and scam policy,” but Pavlov could think of no videos that might be labeled as violative.

“We have nothing to hide,” Pavlov told Ars, calling YouTube’s decision to delete the channel with “zero warnings” a “terrible, terrible day for an independent, honest software brand.”

“We have never been involved with anything remotely shady,” Pavlov said. “We have never taken a single dollar dishonestly from anyone. And we have thousands of customers that stand by our brand.”

Ars saw Pavolov’s post and reached out to YouTube to find out why the channel was targeted for takedown. About three hours later, the channel was suddenly restored. That’s remarkably fast, as YouTube can sometimes take days or weeks to review an appeal. A YouTube spokesperson later confirmed that the Sinesvibes channel was reinstated due to the regular appeals process, indicating perhaps that YouTube could see that Sinesvibes’ removal was an obvious mistake.

Developer calls for more human review

For small brands like Sinesvibes, even spending half a day in limbo was a cause for crisis. Immediately, the brand worried about 50 broken product pages for one of its distributors, as well as “hundreds if not thousands of news articles posted about our software on dozens of different websites.” Unsure if the channel would ever be restored, Sinesvibes spent most of Monday surveying the damage.

Now that the channel is restored, Pavlov is stuck confronting how much of the Sinesvibes brand depends on the YouTube channel remaining online while still grappling with uncertainty since the reason behind the ban remains unknown. He told Ars that’s why, for small brands, simply having a channel reinstated doesn’t resolve all their concerns.

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Elon Musk claims victory after judge blocks Calif. deepfake law

“Almost any digitally altered content, when left up to an arbitrary individual on the Internet, could be considered harmful,” Mendez said, even something seemingly benign like AI-generated estimates of voter turnouts shared online.

Additionally, the Supreme Court has held that “even deliberate lies (said with ‘actual malice’) about the government are constitutionally protected” because the right to criticize the government is at the heart of the First Amendment.

“These same principles safeguarding the people’s right to criticize government and government officials apply even in the new technological age when media may be digitally altered: civil penalties for criticisms on the government like those sanctioned by AB 2839 have no place in our system of governance,” Mendez said.

According to Mendez, X posts like Kohls’ parody videos are the “political cartoons of today” and California’s attempt to “bulldoze over the longstanding tradition of critique, parody, and satire protected by the First Amendment” is not justified by even “a well-founded fear of a digitally manipulated media landscape.” If officials find deepfakes are harmful to election prospects, there is already recourse through privacy torts, copyright infringement, or defamation laws, Mendez suggested.

Kosseff told Ars that there could be more narrow ways that government officials looking to protect election integrity could regulate deepfakes online. The Supreme Court has suggested that deepfakes spreading disinformation on the mechanics of voting could possibly be regulated, Kosseff said.

Mendez got it “exactly right” by concluding that the best remedy for election-related deepfakes is more speech, Kosseff said. As Mendez described it, a vague law like AB 2839 seemed to only “uphold the State’s attempt to suffocate” speech.

Parody is vital to democratic debate, judge says

The only part of AB 2839 that survives strict scrutiny, Mendez noted, is a section describing audio disclosures in a “clearly spoken manner and in a pitch that can be easily heard by the average listener, at the beginning of the audio, at the end of the audio, and, if the audio is greater than two minutes in length, interspersed within the audio at intervals of not greater than two minutes each.”