Partial Victory in Campaign to Restore YouTube Channel

To briefly review:

Due to my alleged support for "violent criminal organizations," which seems to be defined as any group that opposes genocide and supports the rights of Palestinians, my YouTube account was demonetized in January, 2025.  In November, 2025, all of my 50 albums were removed from YouTube Music, with no notification or explanation.

On January 9th, 2026, my channel received its first Strike.  On prior occasions when songs that violated their policy on support for violent criminal organizations were taken down, I received Warnings.  A Strike is worse -- 3 Strikes and your channel gets deleted.

At that point I deleted all versions of the 3 songs that had previously been flagged and removed, because only some of them had at that point been taken down.  But a few days after my one-week suspension from being able to post or upload on YouTube ended, on January 19th, I received an email from YouTube that my entire channel violated  their terms, and would now be permanently deleted.  My appeal was then immediately rejected.  There had never been a second Strike, they just went straight from the first Strike to channel deletion. 

Review over.  Here's what happened next.

Pro-Palestine activist/pundit Guy Christenson's channel was also deleted, along with his existence on TikTok and Instagram.  Guy then posted a video on X about what had happened, which went viral, and resulted in YouTube restoring his account.  Fellow pro-Palestine activist Sarah Wilkinson recommended to me that I make a video like he did, and try to emulate his success.

I put up my own short, captioned video last night, on February 19th, doing my best to copy how Guy does his videos.  Lo and behold, it also went viral.  Overnight it was reposted on X close to 3,000 times.

This morning I got two emails from YouTube, in quick succession.  The first one, somewhat bizarrely, informed me that a song which was not one of the ones they had previously deleted was in violation of their violent criminal organization support policy, and would now be deleted.  It also informed me that as a result of this song being up ("When Luigi Goes On Trial," by Ai Tsuno), my channel would now receive its second Strike, and would be inaccessible to me to post or upload to for 2 weeks. 

At first it seemed strange to have a song deleted from a channel which had already been deleted, including that song and many hundreds of others.  And a second Strike on a channel that had already been deleted.

Then came the next email, a few minutes later, informing me that YouTube had decided that my channel did not violate their policies, and would now be restored. 

And sure enough, it is back.  My children can once again watch my animated children's videos.  History buffs can once again hear the hundreds of songs I've written about labor history and the history of social movements from around the world.  And supporters of the Palestinian cause can once again hear my hundreds of songs that could easily be construed to violate the same policies the random songs they've targeted so far have violated.

Or can they?  No, actually, they can't.  Why is that?  Because this victory is a very partial one.  Those 50 albums that used to be up on the world's second-biggest music streaming platform, YouTube Music, are still not there.  My existence as an artist on YouTube Music, and the thousands of followers I had as an artist there (what they call being a "Topic" in YouTube parlance) are still gone.

In short, I'm still being very much suppressed on YouTube.  Without my albums being restored, this will mean thousands of people every month who used to get my songs recommended to them via YouTube's all-important song recommendation algorithms will no longer discover my music for the first time.  It will mean I have an estimated 30% fewer listeners on YouTube overall, according to music industry people who try to estimate these things.

So, the battle is definitely not won, and much more pressure on YouTube is needed, for them to put my albums back up on YouTube Music, now that they have restored my channel, albeit with a second Strike that may soon lead once again to channel deletion.

Nevertheless, I think it would be very appropriate to take a wee bit of cheer from the fact that my channel was even temporarily restored, because when you look at the sequence and timing of events, this quite obviously happened due to popular pressure, not for any other reason.  Thanks to all of you who canceled your YouTube Premium account, wrote YouTube a message, or reposted my video.  Solidarity is the way to go.