YouTube Terminated My 20-Year Account, then I Was Hacked on X

The shocking dystopian horror of being erased in real time

Early this morning, I was notified by YouTube that my 20-year-old account had been terminated. Poof. Gone. I was accused of being a “spammer” who used other people’s videos to make a quick buck. That was never what I was doing, though I do admit I violated their rules, even if unintentionally and carelessly.

I didn’t use that account for much. I hadn’t monetized it until very recently. I only posted videos there to post elsewhere. I’m sure they never noticed anything I was doing because I didn’t have more than 1K subscribers.

And then I made the mistake of posting a clip from Conan O’Brien explaining why it’s so hard to make jokes about Trump and why just being angry isn’t funny.

You can watch it here:

That video went viral. The video gained almost 1 million views, and by then, I’d turned on monetization, and it had made around $1,300 just before they yanked it. It was clipped from another, longer video, and if I’d added commentary, I wouldn’t have violated their rules against “spamming.” I was just not thinking it through. Most of my videos had only a couple of hundred views.

The Conan video had become a battleground in our Civil War as both sides fought about what Conan really meant. The Leftists were particularly outraged, and that is what drove the traffic so high. I was thrilled. I thought I might try something with YouTube. So I posted a couple more clips that I thought were interesting without realizing I was violating their policies.

I’m sure someone ratted me out for it, and YouTube showed no mercy, even for someone who had an account for 20 years and was as loyal a customer as you could be. All I watch is YouTube. I subscribed to hundreds of channels. I would have deleted it. I apologized. I begged them. But none of that helped.

The door was slammed shut, as it was last year by Hollywood because I voted for Trump. Same energy, as the kids say. These decisions are final. They seem particularly eager to ban people from the Right. They don’t care about you anyway, but especially not if your content leans in the wrong direction.

I am not trying to marinate in self-pity. I accept I broke their rules and that they had every right to, oh, I don’t know, ask me to delete the videos or warn me that I violated the content. But no, I was a “spammer” and a “scammer.”

• Termination Reason: Your account was reviewed by our internal teams following an appeal. The suspension was upheld due to severe or repeated violations of our Community Guidelines regarding Spam, Scams, and Deceptive Practices.

I spent hours with various chat tech support people at Google, all the way up the management chain, and always the same words by the same kind of people, if they were even people, “How are you today?” they ask. “How am I today? I just lost videos of my daughter in elementary school, and I can never get back, that’s how I am today.”

It’s not quite as bad as living in China, but it does give me a glimpse into our potential future, should the Democrats regain control of Big Tech and the internet.

On the upside, I did start a new YouTube account, and I will attempt to rebuild what was there before. This time, I will follow the rules like a good little Communist.

You might say, why stay on YouTube? They are the evil empire. Why would you want anything to do with them? Because I love YouTube. I can’t lie about that. My life is made better by many of the creators who post their work to YouTube. I don’t even watch television anymore. Rumble isn’t quite the same.

And besides, I got online 30 years ago, and I’ve essentially been living online, for better or worse, mostly worse. These sites feel like places I live. They’ve worn a groove, and you can’t teach old dogs new tricks.

If that wasn’t bad enough, later in the day, some Crypto pirate hacked my X account, realsashastone, and I now have no access to it. The pirate is now posting phony Crypto scams, making me look like everything YouTube falsely convicted me of - spammer, deceptive practices, scams.

I once again had to dive into the tangled morass of tech support on a social media site. Everyone knows how impossible this is. Unless you are a very important person, you have no power. None. They have all the power. You are nothing but a piece of lint to be flicked off their jacket.

Both Google and X wrote, “I know this is disappointing to hear.” Is that what psychologists have told them to say when they flick you off their jacket like a piece of lint, and you realize how insignificant you really are?

In one day, my online footprint was cut in half. It was like Back to the Future when Michael J. Fox could see himself disappearing in every photo.

Or a sudden blackout when you have to get out the candles and figure out what to do in the dark. Go to bed early? Read a book? Do yoga? Yes, all of the above.

Maybe I’ll get my X account back. Who knows. I am losing faith. I am but a piece of lint, after all. If I do, I’ll secure it better, change my password, and do all the things you’re supposed to do that I didn’t before.

Either way, you can find me on my new YouTube account at http://www.youtube.com/realsashastone or on my temporary account X (twitter.com/sashastone26).