YouTube bans links to the Come Back Alive Foundation, which helps the army of Ukraine

YouTube has started removing links to the Come Back Alive Foundation that provides support to service members in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, as several Ukrainian video bloggers report. The platform’s explanation sounds quite strange: violation of sex and nudity policy.

• This is not an isolated case or a mistake, as many well-known bloggers report the same. In each case the explanation from the platform (rather, an automatic response) sounds the same:

“Our team has reviewed your content, and, unfortunately, we think it violates our sex and nudity policy. We’ve removed the following content from YouTube.”

• Among those who received similar messages are Mykhas Korhorush, who runs a YouTube channel about pop culture, Tyler Anderson (Olexii Shkrobynets), who has a channel about TV series and movies, as well as many others.

• One of the possible explanations for this situation: massive reports on the videos and links coming from the Russian users, which led to auto-moderation of such content (if the complaints were reviewed by human moderators, they would see that they are absurd).
• Bloggers who faced such a problem are advised to appeal YouTube’s decision.

As of October 10, 2023, YouTube has allegedly applied human moderators to review the appeals of Ukrainian content makers and cancel decisions on fake violations of the rules.