how do I reach a human at YouTube?

[cellio]

A long time ago, I created a YouTube account to post a video to which I hold copyright. Later, Google bought YouTube. Time passed and I mostly forgot about that video.

Recently it's attracted attention and a troll. I would like to take it down.

Old YouTube accounts no longer work; you can't sign in with them. They have a way to claim old accounts, but it is not accepting the password I used (and recorded) at the time, nor any plausible variants. I can prove it's my account; I get email when somebody interacts with it (which is how I was alerted to the newer attention).

I've long since learned my lesson about relying on third-party media-hosting services (yeah, still have a lot of pictures hosted at LJ and Google that I haven't yet cleaned up on this journal). But I need to repair this error from the past.

I could file a DMCA takedown request, but that's the nuclear option and I don't know what repercussions it will have for the account owner, i.e. me.

Does anybody reading this know a better path? No, there's no "contact us" form, and their Twitter responder doesn't do anything other than send links to help I've already read.

Comments

[https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/hsFMttp]

Hi Monica -

While I'm *fairly* confident you'll have been doing some websearching about this, it seems you're not alone. This is a support thread from 2019 from someone in your situation

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/9494551?hl=en&msgid=9494551

And some similar things in here ("gaia" link??):

https://yttalk.com/threads/how-to-recover-a-very-old-youtube-account.283615/#post-2307458

There are one or two links in there that might be illuminating, even if unable to help you achieve your goal here. Hope it helps, all the same!

David
--
Edinburgh, UK

[cellio]

Thanks David. Pity that thread is locked so I can't add info. The claim that having access to the linked email fixes the problem is incorrect.