YouTube is a website that allows you to share videos. It draws attention to the continuous change of its content, videos that are deleted, that are deleted by the author, become private etc. Take for example an article about videos that I have on a subpage where most are no longer available that I show in Fig 1. In this article I will comment on how to recover a video that has been deleted for whatever reason it is from the platform.
According to statista.com in a 2020 report the hours of videos uploaded every minute on YouTube were 500, which gives an idea of the huge number of videos that are added daily to the platform. A feature not only of YouTube but of the internet in general is antifragility (Dan Kaminsky, 2015). It means that not all things should always be working perfectly, because YouTube is constantly in a state of disassembly and assembly.
Video removed for violating Youtube’s terms of use
I saw a tweet where he talked about a supposed page that allowed you to hack Facebook. It should be noted that there is no law or permission that allows a person to access someone else’s Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, none. Therefore, from the outset, this type of content is not legal.
It is striking that this type of pages continues to appear like mushrooms in a forest. The way to combat them I commented on in this article -> Hack Facebook for money, the scam. Basically, what you must do is not interact with the page and if you can report to Google and the hosting provider of the page, so that it is blocked or eliminated for violating the use policies.
There is a video on the website, but that video has been removed from YouTube for breaching the terms of service as seen in Fig 2. This can already give us a clue that is not all gold or that glitters.
Searching for the video URL
If you pass the mouse over the video or click on the PLAY in the lower right corner, a new tab does not open with that video. To know what the original URL of the video is you have to press right button and then COPY URL OF THE VIDEO and that way we know what the address is.
If we now open a YouTube tab and look for that video, we arrive at the same message but already within the same platform as can be seen in Fig. 4.
Locating the title of the video
The way to locate that video of which we know its original URL is to use cache systems, pages that save other pages such as Google Search or Archive.org. Let’s use the second method.
WayBackMachine located at the address archive.org is a large Internet time machine. If the video was stored at some point in the past on this page you will be able to locate it. The URL of the video in case someone has an interest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pA9ZJfssqTA and was effectively cached in the system, a copy was saved in the year 2020.
Information revealed about the video
Once we access the capture we can not see the video, since it has not been saved on page archive.org, but we do see very interesting information, such as what is the title of the video, the user who uploaded it, the number of subscribers at the time the snapshot was saved, the number of views, I like or dislike them and something very important to comment, the video is not listed on YouTube (padlock to the left of the title). The fact that it is not listed means that no one can find the video on YouTube by searching for it in the search engine. It is done that way so that it is not visible to everyone.
Locating the owner of the video
Once we know what the video is, we also have access to the name of the account that uploaded it. If we look for it in the YouTube search engine, we see that it still exists, but it does not have any content.
Therefore, in the end through a page that saves other pages, we have managed to recover the information of that video and it is demonstrated that the reason that that video is not on YouTube is relevant, the original website is false and the content it offers, although it says it is free, is clearly a hoax. The reasons why that video is no longer available even though it is hidden on YouTube is likely because someone reported it and it was later found to be in violation of the platform’s usage policies.
