YouTube’s Community Guidelines Explained and Made Easy

There are many YouTubers out there who don’t know anything about YouTube’s community guidelines. Some people know where to find the guidelines page, but haven’t realized those policies fully yet. Well, this post from our blog details everything you need to know about YouTube’s community guidelines.

Recently YouTube calls its guidelines as ‘policies and safety’. For your information, YouTube’s main policy is NOT to piss off many users/viewers. It may sound weird, but it really is the truth. Let us give an example of it. The same content may be considered a ‘policy violating’ thing on a YouTube video and may just go fine on another YouTube video. I guess, YouTube depends on a report based artificial intelligent system to detect policy violations. That’s why when a huge number of reports are submitted against a particular video, it is automatically taken down.

Since the ‘removal’ process is automatic, the video uploader is given a choice to appeal the removal of a particular video. We hope that every appeal is manually reviewed to reach a resolution/verdict. For the same reason stated above, videos that violate YouTube’s community guidelines may actually sustain for a prolonged time. So we guess now you know what we mean by NOT ‘pissing up’ the majority of viewers.

YouTube’s community guidelines regarding nudity and sexual content

The thing is that YouTube considers itself as a family platform for entertainment. That’s why something that can not be watched with family members together is considered to violate community guidelines. This is the reason sexuality and nudity are not allowed on YouTube. If you must upload such videos, you need to age-restrict them yourself. Because if these nude/sexually explicit videos are later found by common people and reported, they may not only be removed, but the channel may receive community strikes also.

You may have watched many sexually provocative scenes on YouTube, specially on Bollywood and Hollywood songs. But nothing is happening to them because the producers of these songs/scenes have special connection with YouTube’s top officials, even with the policy makers of Google/YouTube. So you can easily guess, as a common YouTuber you don’t compare to them at all.

That’s why, if you upload anything inappropriate on YouTube right this moment, it may be removed the very next moment. From this point of view, YouTube is surely not impartial. It certainly is partial to the ‘powerful’ parties and those living in north America. Because they can easily sue Youtube which Youtubers from India and other developing countries can’t do.

harmful or dangerous content

You’re not supposed to post videos that encourage others to do things that might cause them to get badly hurt or injured, specially kids. Videos showing such harmful and/or dangerous acts may become age-restricted or even removed from YouTube depending on the severity.

Now you might be questioning as to whether cycling over high rise building roof tops can be recorded and uploaded on YouTube. It depends on your location. If you’re a north american YouTuber, you certainly can. But if you’re from an ‘ordinary’ country like India or Pakistan, just keep in mind that these things are prone to ‘heavily reporting’. So you had better not upload such content.

Predatory behavior and threat

When you will have some success in YouTubing, you may have 10k, even 20k subscribers on your channel. Just keep in mind that these 10k or 20k people don’t work for you and each of them may NOT be loyal to you. Also you can’t think of using them for any unfair purpose as pointed out before. Just because your channel has 20k subscribers doesn’t mean that you’re the king of the world now. You still have to behave properly and that too – all the time. A single slip might lead your channel to termination. Never ever show predatory behavior. Such behavior may be proved to be bad for your channel.

The best way to avoid showing such inappropriate behavior is to think that you’re just a YouTube user like everybody else. Also never to threaten anybody on YouTube. If any intentional threat is found by users and then reported, consider your channel as good as gone. I told you guys in a previous article that my first ever YouTube channel was terminated because of comment spamming. Well. I’m not sure about it. It could also have been a result of predatory behavior that some users thought I had shown. Because the last sentence of the comment I posted in several of my videos was “Such thieves and bandits should be banned from YouTube anyway”.  Well, a statement like this can surely be reported to YouTube, can’t it?

YouTube prefers your viewers over you

We think at this stage you have surely got our point – community guidelines or whatever you like to call it, YouTube’s main policy is NOT to get against advertisers and viewers’ community. Here the number of ‘reporting’ community people has to be significant in order to consider a certain type of report/flagging. With that said, you can now come to know the rest of YouTube’s community guidelines by reading the following article:

How to report a YouTube video: In case you found infringing videos on YouTube

Are you afraid of getting reports and strikes on your YouTube videos? In that case, I guess you had better join an MCN right away – to save your channel. Here’s a dependable and promising MCN for you, just follow my referral link:

http://my.mediacube.network/apply?referral=844092