Popular crypto YouTuber Tone Vays tweeted on April 16 that he has had his channel removed from the platform. Vays channel provided trading and market analyses, and in the tweet informs he said that a video was first removed for “harmful and dangerous content”, according to YouTube’s policy, before his channel was removed entirely. Vays has over 100,000 subscribers.

Vays said that the video that was removed was not any different from the other many hundreds of videos he has posted. Speaking to CoinTelegraph, Vays said that the YouTube team had received a complaint and that it was following this that his channel had been affected. The punitive measure goes as far as not allowing Vays to make any other channels on the platform.

Several YouTube channels have been struck down in the past, and towards the end of 2019, this caused an uproar as several influential channels had any videos relating to cryptocurrencies removed. The stipulated reason at that point was also that it involved “harmful and dangerous content.”

There is some consensus that these takedowns have to do with links to external sites or services, but so far there is limited information from YouTube’s side as to why this is occurring. On a positive note, YouTube has said that it would look into the matter, after Vays reached out to them over Twitter, suggesting that maybe an algorithm "got a little ban happy",

As a result of widespread bans and takedowns, some in the community have looked to alternative censorship-free platforms, which in general have seen growing support among social media users of all platforms. Several such platforms, for both video content and general social platforms, are currently being worked on, such as video platform DLive, EOS’ Voice and Publish0x itself.