The LoFi Girl channel was unavailable starting July 10th.
During the last six years, LoFi Girl has gained popularity for its focus/study music. Over the weekend, a bogus DMCA takedown request cut off iconic LoFi Radio streams — and YouTube’s copyright protection policies are again under fire.
On July 10th, YouTube struck the popular channel LoFi Girl, taking down two of the channel’s most popular livestream stations. LofiGirl immediately tweeted that false copyright claims against the content led to YouTube’s takedown, and that its videos ‘comply with live streaming policy’—leaving no reason for their removal.
The two videos ‘LoFi hip hop radio—beats to relax-study to’ and ‘beats to sleep/chill to’ have close to 800 million views, and LoFi Girl shared that the false copyright claims came from “FMC Music Sdn Bhd Malaysia.”
Following the tweet, a firestorm of protest ensued online, and users took to Twitter with #bringbacklofigirl to demand YouTube better manage its copyright claim system. The current automated process automatically flags and takes down videos when it receives a claim—without verifying the facts.
Users questioned this ‘flawed’ copyright protection system. It appears that a lack of human interactions during the copyright review process has caused frequent takedown of content and channels. Sadly, false takedown requests can bury a less high-profile channel for good.
For LoFi Girl, this isn’t the first time the channel faced the brunt of individuals abusing YouTube’s policies. Back in February 2020, the entire LoFi Girl channel was terminated after copyright claims flagged it. The channel was ultimately reinstated, and YouTube accepted its error, but it appears that since then, no action has been taken to protect creators from false copyright strikes.
This kink in YouTube’s copyright protection policies has become a constant threat to channels, and creators have been urging the platform to solve this recurring issue.
Fortunately for LoFi Girl fans, YouTube apologized for the incident today, resolved the strikes, and said it had reinstated the Lofi livestreams. However, the videos can take up to 48 hours to go back live.
But following Youtube’s apology, users were quick to point out that smaller creators do not receive the same consideration as LoFi Girl’s 10.7 M subscriber channel, and are simply abandoned to ‘create a brand-new channel’ from scratch.
LoFi Girl also addressed this in a tweet, noting how creators are ‘hit daily by these false claims on both videos and livestreams’, and YouTube should consider ‘applying changes to their copyright reporting system to prevent such a situation from recurring, and protect all content creators once and for all.’
Creators have been urging YouTube to ensure claims are checked and verified before videos and channels are flagged or taken down by implementing appropriate measures to prevent this abuse of YouTube policies.