Why this matters more than it sounds
When a video is gone, there are two completely different reasons, and the difference is the creator's reputation:
Nobody kept a copy. Storage ran out, a steward left, a phone was lost. No one decided anything.
Somebody made a decision. The creator deleted it, a copyright process ran, or it was purged and reported as required by law.
Show the same message for both and you have quietly accused every creator whose work simply ran out of hosts. The rule:
Loss of all available copies is not owner deletion, copyright removal, illegal-content purging, moderation, or proof the record never existed. It is an availability and preservation failure.
How the code enforces it
Not by convention. Availability states and removal states are different types in the implementation, with no conversion between them. Assigning one where the other belongs does not compile.
Two further guards run in the conformance suite on every build:
- No availability state may produce text containing removal language - removed, deleted, taken down, blocked, banned - unless it is explicitly negating it
- Every removal state must read unmistakably as a removal
This lives in conformance rather than a style guide because the place it will silently break is a UI change made two years from now by someone who never read the spec.
The vocabulary
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A removed item has no availability state at all
Once something is removed, "how many copies exist" stops being the question being asked, so the answer is not computed. Reporting owner-deleted, 14 replicas would invite an interface to show the replica count as though the content were still reachable.
What the creator is warned about, in advance
Phone-only participation works, but uninstalling the app, losing the phone, or exhausting storage may remove your final creator-controlled copy.
Push increases community preservation. It promises no immortality. An unpushed item may lose community replicas, and abandoning every creator-controlled copy may make recovery impossible. Saying so up front is part of the design, not fine print.