The company indicated that the restriction occurred because of a failure during their review processes. Youtubers complain that the banned videos have not yet been re-enabled.
Google’s own subsidiary admitted that the sudden removal of YouTube videos related to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies was due to an internal error. The platform dedicated to distributing multimedia content replied to dozens of users, who complained through Twitter about the disappearance of their videos.
YouTube did not clarify the kind of error, so it is still not known if it was something human, technical, voluntary or involuntary that caused the removal of the content. They only noted that it occurred during its review processes.
It was reported on Thursday, December 26th, that YouTube had sent a message to user @themooncarl, explaining that it had been a mistake on their part during the review process. They promised to restore this user’s video and solve the problem and requested that he let them know if the opposite happened.
Even though they admitted the error and offered to resolve the problem gradually, the company has not yet reversed the situation, at least not completely. On Friday, December 27th, they told the user @dobcrypto1 that they were “actively working to solve it” and asked him to be patient.
A review of the @TeamYouTube account’s tweet and reply history shows that the company continues replying to more requests for information about deleted videos, evidence that the problem remains.
Other YouTubers, such as @boxmining, noted that their channels were operational with their videos again. A similar situation was reported by @ChrisDunnTV, albeit only partially, with some videos restored but with dozens of others still missing.
Beginning of Crisis
The disappearance of videos related to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general raised alarm among hundreds of YouTube users, who received on Christmas Eve e-mails telling them that the videos had been deleted as being material with harmful or dangerous content and that they were violating community guidelines. The messages were then shared by those affected on social networks, notifying YouTube of what had happened.
An unidentified YouTube spokesperson told digital media on Thursday that the company, due to the large number of videos that it processes every day, sometimes makes mistakes like this.
The person, who claimed that YouTube’s policy on Bitcoin has not changed and that the channels involved will not be penalized, said that the large volume of videos on their site sometimes leads them to make the wrong call. He also explained that whenever they are told that a video was deleted by mistake, they act quickly to restore it.
These events provoked reactions in the crypto ecosystem among well-known personalities requesting the creation of an independent platform to protect the contents of centralized entities. Two of them were the CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, and the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin.
It should be remembered that Google reported in March last year that it would ban any advertising related to cryptocurrencies and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) from its platform, a decision that was partially reversed six months later.
By Willmen Blanco
