Youtube yesterday removed hundreds of videos of an user posting vintage electronics repair videos. The user "shango066" saw his videos removed without any specific warning from Youtube other than a generic e-mail. Currently his Youtube page states, "This account has been suspended due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube's policy against spam, gaming, misleading content, or other Terms of Service violations."
Shangoo66's channel had nearly 2 million views, generated by more than 400 videos. The videos contained very detailed work on restoration of vintage TV's and radios and were a valuable source of knowledge for many. According to the user no warning was given and all he received was a generic e-mail telling the user his account was suspended. There was no mention of copyright violation, no mention of users tagging the videos as inappropriate or a large amount of dislikes.
The only possible reason the users and his followers can think of is that the vintage radios and TV obviously played content sometimes. As shangoo66 explains in a phonecall to a fan, a TV could play a part of an episode of the Simpsons. It might be that such a thing could trigger Youtube's copyright filters.
As Shangoo66 states in the phone conversation, "thousands of hours of work, down the toilet and apparently there is no way to appeal it."
Currently many of shangoo66's fans are trying to generate publicity. Unfortunately the issue is not by itself, trusting content to cloud storage providers have been proven to result in losing an account and/or the associated data. Don't store privacy sensitive data at third parties and it appears you also can't rely on them to base your business or hobby on, it appears.
Update: shangoo66's account has been restored. He has posted a return video, which indicates that YouTube may have suspended his account due to the large number of private/unlisted videos on his account that he had not got around to editing yet. This may have led to YouTube's algorithm falsely detecting that he was abusing his account for personal/backup storage.
