YouTube is giving creators a way to remove Community Guidelines warnings from their channels.
The platform introduced warnings in 2019 as a way to give creators a punishment-free heads-up that they’d violated Community Guidelines. Before warnings were a thing, YouTube went straight to giving creators strikes, which impacted their ability to do livestreams, upload new videos, and–if they accumulated enough strikes–would result in the deletion of their channel.
With warnings, YouTube removed the violating video, but otherwise didn’t take any action against the creator or their channel. However, channels only got one single lifetime warning. If they violated Community Guidelines and already had a warning on their record, it was an immediate strike.
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Now, YouTube is introducing educational courses that, if completed, will remove warnings from channels’ records.
“We believe educational efforts are successful at reducing the number of creators who unintentionally violate our policies,” YouTube said in a company blog post. “We’ve designed each training course to provide creators with more clarity about the type of content that violates our policies.”
For example, it says, maybe a creator posts a sex ed video, but YouTube decides it violates Community Guidelines because “it lacks sufficient context under our nudity and sexual content policy.”
“Previously, we’d remove the video and apply a lifetime warning to the channel,” YouTube explains. “Going forward, while we’ll still remove the violative content from YouTube, creators who choose to take our course will review a series of questions about our sexual content policies and learn how to better stay within our policy lines.”
YouTube tells Tubefilter courses will consist of seven questions, and will take around 15 minutes for creators to complete.
So long as a creator completes the course and doesn’t violate the same policy for 90 days, the warning will be removed from their channel.
If they violate the same policy before the 90-day window is up, they’ll go straight to getting strikes. If they violate the same policy after the 90-day window is up, they’ll get a warning, and will be able to take a new course to erase it.
“We believe this update will help the vast majority of creators who strive to produce content that complies with our Community Guidelines, and will help keep YouTube a safe and responsible platform for everyone,” YouTube says.
This change does not mean any of YouTube’s Community Guidelines are shifting. The rules will remain the same; it’s just now, if a creator breaks one of them, that mistake doesn’t have to be a permanent mark on their channel.
