The Community Guidelines are the rules of the road for how to behave on YouTube. These policies apply to all types of content on our platform, including unlisted and private content, comments, links, Community posts and thumbnails. This list isn't complete. If your content violates our community guidelines, your channel will get a strike.
Note: We may remove content for reasons other than Community Guidelines violations. For example, a first-party privacy complaint or a court order. In these cases, your channel won't get a strike.
Creating with common sense: YouTube Community Guidelines
What happens when you get a strike
When you get a strike, you're told via email. You can also choose to have notifications sent to you through your mobile and computer notifications, and in your channel settings. We'll also tell you:
- What content was removed
- Which policies it violated (e.g. 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 that mistakes happen and that you don't necessarily mean to violate our policies – that's why the first violation is typically only a warning. To have this warning expire after 90 days, you can take policy training. However, if your content violates the same policy within that 90-day window, the warning will not expire and your channel will be given a strike.
Sometimes a single case of severe abuse will result in channel termination without warning. If you think that we made a mistake, you can submit an appeal.
Optional policy training sessions
Policy training sessions are short in-product educational experiences based on the specific Community Guidelines policy that you have violated.
If you receive a Community Guidelines warning, you can access the policy training from your Studio account anywhere that you typically check your policy violations. This includes the Studio dashboard and the content tab. You'll also see a link to open the training session from the email and banner notifications. Note: Not all Community Guidelines warnings are eligible for policy training.
If you complete the optional policy training, your warning will expire after 90 days. The 90-day period starts from when the training is completed, not when the warning is issued. If you violate a different policy after completing the training, you will get another warning.
Repeated violations of our policies – or a single case of severe abuse – may still result in the termination of your account. We may prevent repeat offenders from completing training in the future.
First strike
If we find that your content doesn't follow our policies for a second time, you'll get a strike.
This strike means that you will not be allowed to do the following for one week:
- Upload videos or live streams
- Start a scheduled live stream
- Schedule a video to become public
- Create a Premiere
- Add a trailer to an upcoming Premiere or live stream
- Create customised thumbnails or Community posts
- Create, edit or add collaborators to playlists
- Add or remove playlists from the watch page using the 'Save' button
Your scheduled public content is set to 'private' for the penalty period duration. You have to reschedule it when the freeze period ends.
Note: The penalty starts from the date of acknowledgement.
After the one-week period, we will restore full privileges automatically, but the strike will remain on your channel for 90 days.
A strike may also result in losing access to advanced features. Learn more about how to regain access.
Second strike
If you get a second strike within the same 90-day period as your first strike, you will not be allowed to post content for two weeks. If there are no further issues, after the two-week period we will restore full privileges automatically. Each strike will not expire until 90 days from the time that it was issued.
Third strike
Three strikes in the same 90-day period results in your channel being permanently removed from YouTube. Each strike will not expire until 90 days from the time that it was issued.
Note: Deleting your content doesn't 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 when 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 that your content follows our policies.
- If your channel has received a strike and you think that we've made a mistake, let us know. You can appeal the decision here.
YouTube also reserves the right to restrict a creator's ability to create content at its discretion. Your channel may be turned off or restricted from using any YouTube features.
If this happens, you're prohibited from using, creating or acquiring another channel to get around these restrictions. This prohibition applies as long as the restriction remains active on your YouTube channel. Violation of this restriction is considered circumvention under our Terms of Service and may result in the termination of all of your existing YouTube channels, any new channels that you create or acquire and channels in which you are repeatedly or prominently featured.