Bryan W. Van Norden (@BryanVanNorden) on X

Long story: It's hard to get any detailed answers from an actual person at YouTube (which is owned by

) but as far as I can tell, here is what happened in more detail... 2/

Most of the content on my channel was created by me, or is playlists of material on other channels relevant to my teaching. However, because I teach about "Orientalism"... 3/

I also uploaded a series of clips from a 1934 film, "Java Head," which is historically important because it is an early film about an interracial marriage, and stars the first great Chinese-American actress, Anna May Wong... 4/

"Java Head" is almost impossible to find, either online or on DVD (I found the video hosted on a free Facebook page), so I wanted to make some curated clips available for my students. I uploaded the clips last year... 5/

...and they've been on my channel for months without any warnings from YouTube about potential problems, but recently an external bot owned by a company called "LeakID" found the clips and made a copyright claim against them to YouTube. 6/

YouTube's policy is that an account is disabled after three "copyright strikes" against them. When you get one copyright strike, you get a warning. However, because I had more than three clips from "Java Head," I immediately got more than three strikes... 7/

...so without warning to me an internal YouTube bot closed my channel and erased my content. To protest a copyright strike, you have to log into your channel, but of course I cannot do that because they deleted my channel. 8/

I did find email addresses to appeal directly to YouTube and Google: YouTube said I did not have a legitimate response to the copyright strikes, and Google said they could not help me because my account had been deleted and cannot be restored. 9/

My Chinese Philosophy Class Lectures series covered Confucians like Mengzi, Daoists like Zhuangzi, the Classic of Changes (I Ching), Mahayana and Theravada Buddhism, East Asian Buddhism including Huayan and Zen, Neo-Confucianism, Chinese feminism... 10/

...and Chinese responses to modernity, including the May Fourth Movement, Communism, and recent trends like Xi Jinping's Confucian socialism. The videos were arranged in historical order with cross-reference cards, and had been used and praised by people all over the world. 11/

My entire lecture series has been deleted because one careless bot told another careless bot to do so. 12/

I'm surprisingly calm about all this. I had been considering re-doing the lectures because I now know better how to record them and I've updated the content for a few of the lectures. I'm in negotiation with

to host the revised lectures. 13/

However, I'm sharing my horror story so that others know what can happen if you trust YouTube and Google to use ordinary common sense and responsibly safeguard your audio-visual material. 14/

Here is a dead link to where the lecture series was. END THREAD 15/15