Community Guidelines are the rules of the road for how to behave on YouTube. If your content violates our Community Guidelines, your channel will be issued a strike.
Sometimes content is removed for reasons other than Community Guidelines violations, such as a first-party privacy complaint or a court order. In these cases, the uploader won't get a strike.
What happens if you get a strike
If a strike is issued, we’ll let you know by email, through notifications on mobile and computer, and in your channel settings. We’ll also tell you:
- What content was removed
- Which policies it violated (for example harassment or violence)
- How it affects your channel
- What you can do next
If your content violates our Community Guidelines, here’s how it affects your channel:
Warning
We understand mistakes happen and you don’t mean to violate our policies — that’s why the first violation is usually only a warning. Note that you’ll only be warned once, and this warning will remain on your channel. The next time your content is found to violate the Community Guidelines you'll get a strike. Sometimes a single case of severe abuse will result in channel termination without warning. If you think we made a mistake, you can appeal the warning.
First Strike
If we find your content doesn’t follow our policies for a second time, you'll get a strike.
This means you're unable to do the following for 1 week:
- Upload videos, live streams, or stories
- Create custom thumbnails or Community posts
- Create, edit, or add collaborators to playlists
- Add or remove playlists from the watch page using the “Save” button
- Show a trailer during your Premieres
- Send viewers from a live stream to a Premiere or send viewers from a Premiere to a live stream
Full privileges will be restored automatically after the 1-week period, but your strike will remain on your channel for 90 days.
Second Strike
If you get a second strike within the same 90-day period as your first strike, you will not be able to post content for 2 weeks. If there are no further issues, full privileges will be restored automatically after the 2-week period, but each strike will not expire until 90 days from the time it was issued.
Third Strike
Three strikes in the same 90-day period will result in your channel being permanently removed from YouTube. Again, each strike will not expire until 90 days from the time it was issued.
Note: Deleting your content will not remove a strike. We may also issue a Community Guidelines strike on deleted content. You can learn more about when we retain deleted content in our Privacy policy.
What to do if you get a strike
We want to help you stay on YouTube, so remember to do the following:
- Learn about our Community Guidelines to make sure your content follows our policies.
- If your channel got a strike, and you think we've made a mistake, let us know. You can appeal this decision here.
YouTube also reserves the right to restrict a creator's ability to create content at its discretion. If your account has been disabled or restricted from using any YouTube features, you're prohibited from using another channel to get around these restrictions. This applies for as long as the restriction remains active on your account. Violation of this restriction is considered circumvention under our Terms of Service, and may result in termination of your account.