The Little Shaman Healing YouTube channel hosts an educational audio podcast about personality types and healing from trauma. There is a rapidly-growing community of almost 70,000 subscribers and even more listeners, people all supporting each other in their journey to heal from trauma.
In the past few months, the channel has been wrongfully flagged for violations of the YouTube Terms of Service agreement (spam, deceptive business practices, promoting violence). The strikes are generally appealed and then removed, as they are baseless. However, this time they have terminated the channel without giving an opportunity to appeal the strikes, and the support chat also claimed that the channel was terminated for a different reason than was initially stated. We have been unable to ascertain what content is violating YouTube's guidelines and no one has given a specific answer. We are also unable to ascertain how it was determined that such violations have even taken place. It does not seem likely any person actually vetted this, as the alleged violations are the diametric opposite of the content. The channel only had 1 strike, then received another for promoting violence. As soon as the strike was appealed, the account was terminated - literally immediately.
The Little Shaman Healing YouTube channel has never and will never promote/depict violence. Its content is the antithesis of violence, in fact, and most of it depicts nothing (the majority of the videos are audio spoken over an image). The channel does not use spam, artificially inflate views or inorganically obtain subscribers. It does not use deceptive practices, such as redirecting viewers or "clickbait" titles/thumbnails. The channel has received multiple threats from the real-life abusers of viewers and subscribers, though; it is entirely possible that it has been the target of a campaign to get it taken down. It may even just be a simple mistake.
YouTube's stance on the content of this channel is particularly confusing, because virtually all of the 300 videos have been manually reviewed and found to be "suitable for all advertisers." It's perplexing how they can be considered "suitable for all advertisers" while containing spam, deceptive practices or violence and dangerous behavior.
As stated, there is a rapidly-growing community of almost 70,000 subscribers and even more listeners, people all supporting each other in their journey to heal from trauma who have been seriously affected by the termination of this channel. Its reputation has been damaged, because everyone who visits the channel receives a message that says the channel has been removed re: "multiple or severe violations" due to using "deceptive business practices."
It is our contention that these violations to YouTube TOS have not occurred and the removal of the channel, damage to The Little Shaman's reputation and damage to the brand constitute an unfair and unjust practice by YouTube. We would like the channel reinstated immediately. We would also like YouTube to review their flagging system, as it seems to rely almost entirely on the sincere intentions of the person reporting the content -- with no vetting or accuracy evaluation by a human being whatsoever. When someone's entire body of work can be damaged, when thousands or even millions of dollars in income can be lost, when help for millions of people can simply be erased, that is just not good enough. There is nothing in place to protect creators in the event that they are maliciously targeted, or even from a simple error. The Little Shaman is not the only creator that has been negatively impacted by this ineffective system.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.