Big YouTube channels are being banned. YouTubers are blaming AI (mashable.com)

Several high-profile YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers were mysteriously terminated after the platform flagged them as “connected” to a Japanese-language channel that previously received multiple copyright strikes. Affected creators — including Enderman, Scratchit Gaming and 4096 — said they had no relationship to that account and blamed YouTube’s growing use of automated moderation and appeal systems; YouTube later told Mashable it reinstated several channels and said the initial terminations were not determined by automated enforcement. The episode matters because it highlights technical and governance risks as platforms scale moderation with AI. YouTube publicly uses a mix of automated systems (including LLM-powered classifiers for ads) and human review, and policy allows automated removal when systems report high confidence. But network-based linking (graph analysis tying accounts together), confidence thresholds, and possible automated appeals workflows can produce false positives that cascade across many creators, causing reputational and financial harm. For the AI/ML community this is a reminder to prioritize explainability, audit logs, conservative thresholds, human-in-the-loop checks, and transparent redress mechanisms when deploying high-impact automated enforcement at scale.