Contests and sweepstakes are carefully regulated in America, with slightly different regimes in all 50 states. You should not run one unless you have gotten legal help with it!
Was there a warning? Was there some communication with the owner saying "Hey, what you're doing violates or Ts&Cs"? It seems like if there was, the owner would be tweeting that he disagrees with the deletion rather that completely not understanding why it happened.
Putting more humans in the loop would be more expensive, but it would help end these puzzling situations where creators don't know why they've been told to stop creating.
I think it's worth noting that algorithms like these are deployed specifically to take employees out of the loop, and adding a communications step would almost certainly pull them back in.
Potentially, though another consideration the algorithm implementers have is to make it difficult to "game" them. If it provides feedback, you make it easier for someone to figure out what will slip through and subvert the it.
One possible guess would be the account getting hacked, somehow moved to a different address, then deleted. (I have no idea how primary e-mail addresses work for Google/Gmail accounts, except that what used to be a standalone YouTube account got merged into a Google account which once I created a gmail address for it suddenly had a different primary e-mail address, so there are ways for stuff like this to change and "brand accounts" complicate it further on YouTube).
Sweepstakes and giveaways aren't banned, they just have some overhead and legal requirements around them.
They don't and thus have no more legal authority to "know/id" illegality than they have to "know/id" legality.
[1] https://odysee.com/@TheLinuxExperiment:e/win-the-tuxedo-aura...
I expect things like this to continue to grow as we rely more and more on algorithms in all walks of life without thinking through true recourse options.
An analogy would be like a TV host telling the audience to watch the show on five televisions so that they would get a higher Nielsen ratings and then get more money from advertisers. No TV network or advertiser would be happy about that.
In other words, if this is what was really happening, this channel was essentially trying to scam YouTube into thinking they were more popular than they really are for their own monetary gain.
To me it seems like this channel deserved what they got, if the allegations are true.
I even doubt that the channel was automatically removed by an algorithm. Maybe it was flagged by one for human review. Just because a company doesn’t contact you doesn’t mean a human wasn’t involved in your particular case. Furthermore, just because Sweetwater got away with it one time doesn’t mean it’s not against the TOS.
I’m just speculating, and I don’t have skin in the game.
Your concerns about "scamming" aren't relevant. Many of YouTube's most popular channels do this sort of contest, and there is no hard ban on this type of thing.
but no more detail than that I can see...
How can deleting the entire channel without warning possibly be the ethical move here?