Massive Mishap: NTV's 2M YouTube Fans Slip Away!

On Monday, February 13th, YouTube terminated NTV's YouTube account, which had over 2.1 million subscribers, leaving visitors to the NTV Kenya channel with a blank page and a red strip indicating that the account was no longer accessible. The red strip read: "This account has been terminated for violating YouTube's Community Services."

According to Social Media Guru Brian Muuo, a channel gets terminated after violating YouTube's guidelines three times within 90 days. This means that the account is deleted from the platform. However, NTV still has the option to appeal and have the suspension reviewed depending on the reason for the termination.

When a channel violates YouTube's guidelines, the platform punishes them with strikes, which may lead to a ban. For instance, the ban includes a ban from uploading stories, live streams, or stories, starting a scheduled live stream, creating custom thumbnails, add or removing playlists from the watch page using the 'save' button, among others. The first and second strikes result in a ban for one and two weeks, respectively.

The media outlet received an e-mail from the platform indicating which guidelines they violated. The channel shared more than 100,000 videos on the platform, including cut-outs from news bulletins and live events, before the channel was terminated.

YouTube introduced guidelines to enhance the user experience on the platform, including the community guidelines that touch on spam and deceptive practices, impersonation, external links, fake engagement, and playlist policies. Other guidelines touch on sensitive content, violent or dangerous content, regulated goods sold on YouTube, and misinformation.

This is the second time that NTV's account was terminated. In 2016, their account was terminated for violating community guidelines.