YouTube has deleted SemperVideo, a 13 year-old educational German IT channel

[itrr14]

Summary

 

YouTube has deleted SemperVideo, a 13 year-old educational German IT channel, after they received three strikes against their channel for questionable reasons. SemperVideo had a wide variety of tutorials ranging from Raspberry Pis to Samba.

The first strike came from a video where SemperVideo showed viewers how to install a VPN using the command prompt and the reasoning for the strike was "showing hacking instructions" (Source). The second strike came when SemperVideo uploaded a video showing how to access a "hidden" Windows 10 2004 start menu, which involved importing a registry tweak. Their official blog post about the situation can be read here. (This was using Google Translate).

 

This isn't the first time a channel has been striked due to teaching "hacking". The Verge made an article in 2019 about Null Byte who received a strike for using Wi-Fi to launch fireworks for July 4th, which YouTube later said was a mistake.

 

Quotes

From SemperVideo's Too Dangerous for YouTube (translated):

Quote

YouTube removed the so-called monetization of the video and provided the video with an age restriction. The video can now only be seen by people who are 18 years of age or older.

 

Team YouTube has responded on Twitter:

Quote

Hi there! We have already passed it on to the specialist teams to have it checked. We will contact you as soon as we have more information.

 

My thoughts

This is concerning as there are countless tutorial videos on YouTube that involve using the command prompt or making registry tweaks, with such as LTT and Level1Techs.

 

The Twitter post by Team YouTube doesn't bring much hope as SemperVideo mentioned in his video post about their first strike and how they were assigned a specialist to analyze the reason for the strike, and it was upheld.

 

Sources

SemperVideo's blog post on the removal: http://sempervideo.de/youtube-hat-sempervideo-geloescht/

SemperVideo's video post on their first strike: http://sempervideo.de/video/stand-der-dinge-und-frohe-weihnachten/?tape=2

SemperVideo's blog post on their second strike: http://sempervideo.de/zu-gefaehrlich-fuer-youtube-2/

Team YouTube's response: https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1352637628143853572

The Verge's post on Null Byte's YouTube strike: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/3/20681586/youtube-ban-instructional-hacking-phishing-videos-cyber-weapons-lab-strike

 

 

[GCandy77]

Sorry to hear this ... I dont know to much on this Topic, but if you are in contact with this person I recommend https://d.tube/

 

 

[WereCatf]

7 minutes ago, itrr14 said:

how to install a VPN using the command prompt and the reasoning for the strike was "showing hacking instructions"

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

[itrr14]

Just now, GCandy77 said:

Sorry to hear this ... I dont know to much on this Topic, but if you are in contact with this person I recommend https://d.tube/

 

 

I am not in contact with them, but I read about their situation and wanted to bring it up here to hopefully get some airtime on the WAN show to help rectify the problem, similar to what happened with Hardware Unboxed.

[Kisai]

5 minutes ago, itrr14 said:

 

 

The Twitter post by Team YouTube doesn't bring much hope as SemperVideo mentioned in his video post about their first strike and how they were assigned a specialist to analyze the reason for the strike, and it was upheld.

 

 

I had a content id claim on something that was in the public domain and youtube did nothing, and as the rights owners are apparently not in the US, no way of escalating it, so I just muted that part of the video because an IDENTICAL video I made with a different sound generator didn't get claimed and pointed to that.

 

It really sucks for content creators who know what they're doing when the machine learning doesn't, and the people who review the content aren't allowed to use their personal knowledge to make a decision.

 

Ultimately, what needs to go away is the "strikes" system. It chases people off the platform. The easiest solution here is that warnings should be given to allow the owner of the channel to refute the claim, and if there is no amicable resolution, the video or section of the video that is contested gets blocked/muted/censored/substituted. Bring that to arbitration or a court.

[itrr14]

1 minute ago, WereCatf said:

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

As a software engineer, I also have the same reaction. It's very worrying that more videos that actually show hacking and how to prevent against it, like SQL injection, could also be taken down and those that use YouTube as a learning tool would become unaware such an attack.

[wamred]

Oof, come on YouTube you are better than this 

[itrr14]

1 minute ago, Kisai said:

 

I had a content id claim on something that was in the public domain and youtube did nothing, and as the rights owners are apparently not in the US, no way of escalating it, so I just muted that part of the video because an IDENTICAL video I made with a different sound generator didn't get claimed and pointed to that.

 

It really sucks for content creators who know what they're doing when the machine learning doesn't, and the people who review the content aren't allowed to use their personal knowledge to make a decision.

 

Ultimately, what needs to go away is the "strikes" system. It chases people off the platform. The easiest solution here is that warnings should be given to allow the owner of the channel to refute the claim, and if there is no amicable resolution, the video or section of the video that is contested gets blocked/muted/censored/substituted. Bring that to arbitration or a court.

The biggest issue at the moment is that the claimant has all the power and can disagree when you protest it, and you end up with a strike on your channel, even if you never had any of their content in your video in the first place, and YouTube will do nothing to help.

[Dutch_Master]

1 minute ago, itrr14 said:

YouTube as a learning tool

Since when is YT part of the IT Curriculum?

[Kisai]

Just now, Dutch_Master said:

Since when is YT part of the IT Curriculum?

YT is used to train machine learning algorithms, particularly text to speech and speech recognition.

[IkeaGnome]

13 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Cry. It sets a bad precedent for them for the future. Either they ban a 13 year old channel, and only a 13 year old channel for using command prompt, or everyone that's ever used command prompt for a video gets warned about being banned/banned if they do it too many times.

Edited January 22, 2021 by Voluspa
Wasn't a 13 year old. Channel was 13 years old

[itrr14]

Just now, wamred said:

Oof, come on YouTube you are better than this 

Especially when in the past, they did the same thing and marked it as a mistake, but yet their policies didn't change to prevent more strikes. I wonder how many smaller channels that didn't have such a fan base to spread the word that had good tutorials were taken down without any help.

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, Voluspa said:

Either they ban a 13 year old and a 13 year old for using command prompt

You got confused somewhere: the channel is 13 years old, Youtube didn't ban a 13-year old kid's channel.

[itrr14]

1 minute ago, Voluspa said:

Cry. It sets a bad precedent for them for the future. Either they ban a 13 year old and only a 13 year old for using command prompt, or everyone that's ever used command prompt for a video gets warned about being banned/banned if they do it too many times.

Just wanted to point out its a 13 year old channel, not person.

[wamred]

2 minutes ago, itrr14 said:

Especially when in the past, they did the same thing and marked it as a mistake, but yet their policies didn't change to prevent more strikes. I wonder how many smaller channels that didn't have such a fan base to spread the word that had good tutorials were taken down without any help.

I have no idea, but you're 1000% right. They need to actually do something to change it instead of just going with the flow so often. 

[Sauron]

Kinda weird that these channels would be struck down for "hacking" when there are plenty of channels that show the command line and are doing just fine including some that straight up teach actual hacking for educational purposes like LiveOverflow.

[IkeaGnome]

3 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

You got confused somewhere: the channel is 13 years old, Youtube didn't ban a 13-year old kid's channel.

 

3 minutes ago, itrr14 said:

Just wanted to point out its a 13 year old channel, not person.

Gotta get my coffee. I'll fix that. Thanks. Either way, the same thought behind it stands. It being a 13 year old channel makes it worse. They either have to back out of that or completely stick to their guns on it.

[itrr14]

Just now, Sauron said:

Kinda weird that these channels would be struck down for "hacking" when there are plenty of channels that show the command line and are doing just fine including some that straight up teach actual hacking for educational purposes like LiveOverflow.

Exactly my thought. But maybe this is the start and if these other channels start getting reported, they will also be taken down.

[Sauron]

2 minutes ago, itrr14 said:

Exactly my thought. But maybe this is the start and if these other channels start getting reported, they will also be taken down.

maybe..? but I really don't see why, it's not illegal in any capacity and it doesn't hurt youtube's revenue...

[Curufinwe_wins]

12 minutes ago, itrr14 said:

Exactly my thought. But maybe this is the start and if these other channels start getting reported, they will also be taken down.

Laws are also different in various countries, and that can have an impact on YTs responsibility. Germany has some pretty vague and broad laws prohibiting manufacturing, programming, installing, or spreading software that has the primary goal of circumventing security measures. There were concerns in mid 2000s that the law would make things even worse if it was ever applied too broadly.

 

Of course, the bigger thing is just reach. Being a moderate to big player (but not big enough to tell YT to go fuck itself) is always at far higher risk of being seen and then reported than a random video by some person with 200 views over 10 years.

[Bytestrike]

1 hour ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

LaGermany has some pretty vague and broad laws prohibiting manufacturing, programming, installing, or spreading software that has the primary goal of circumventing security measures.

The laws that you mean are generally part of the copyright laws. Your allowed to use VPNs and such, you can even legally circumvent geo-blocks. However if you use software tools to download/distribute or otherwise change/interact with copyrighted content without the consent of the copyright-holder, than you breaking these laws. 

So in summary: Showing People how to install/ use a VPN is not illegal, showing them how to download torrents/ music and stuff is illegal.

The main law for this is §95a UrhG, you can translate and read them if you want.

[itrr14]

1 hour ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Laws are also different in various countries, and that can have an impact on YTs responsibility. Germany has some pretty vague and broad laws prohibiting manufacturing, programming, installing, or spreading software that has the primary goal of circumventing security measures. There were concerns in mid 2000s that the law would make things even worse if it was ever applied too broadly.

 

Of course, the bigger thing is just reach. Being a moderate to big player (but not big enough to tell YT to go fuck itself) is always at far higher risk of being seen and then reported than a random video by some person with 200 views over 10 years.

SemperVideo was a moderately sized YouTube channel with over 300K subscribers. It's not like he had no following at all. 300K is quite large for a channel in German focusing on IT videos.

[Curufinwe_wins]

1 minute ago, itrr14 said:

SemperVideo was a moderately sized YouTube channel with over 300K subscribers. It's not like he had no following at all. 300K is quite large for a channel in German focusing on IT videos.

Yes which is where you are most at risk. 300k isn't enough to bully youtube (like LTT or similar 8 figure ones sortof can), but its enough to get all the attention

[Dr_Whom]

There's a joke here somewhere.... Help me out here.

 

[jagdtigger]

Seems like its already back.....  Its pretty bad if you can get booted out for using a simple tool built into the OS.