Not surprised. Youtube has been known to sell likes/dislikes for years. "Trending" videos for Pop Music will be minutes old yet have thousands of likes and views. The views and like/disklike ratio are about as useful as comments or Twitter followers.
I don't know it's actually youtube that does it. It's actually known that you can just buy an influence by purchasing access to bot accounts[1]. This happens on YT, Twitter, FB and other places, and it isn't just likes/dislikes but also comments.
First mistake is assuming that any YT numbers are real. Second mistake is assuming that YT numbers are accurate. Third mistake is assuming that YT numbers represent what you think they represent.
You said no one would care other than twitter. However cnn made it's money the past four years sensationalizing everything about the previous administration, so that is evidence that people other than twitter care.. CNN's former viewers.
Whatever CNN is, I think it is more than and has existed longer than "made it's money the past four years sensationalizing everything about the previous administration".
Let alone how that ties to its ratings.
You're out in the weeds with these characterizations and connections.
CNNs ratings have dropped precipitously after Trump left office, after rising quite a bit during his time in office. Several accusations against their hosts, such as Maddow, have been met with responses of 'this was exaggeration' in courts of law (an argument judges have accepted).
With that in mind, and keeping in mind CNN is a pretty mainstream news source, it's pretty obvious that a large segment of CNNs viewers did care about such scandals during the previous administration, which means quite a bit of non-tweeters did.
You are comparing breaking treaties, attacking allies, sympathizing with our long time enemies, rolling back regulation, mishandling pandemic to youtube removal of votes?
If this is the biggest thing the right media can sensationalize, I say the current administration is doing pretty damn good.
Do you think that's hypocritical? Trump and his most visible supporters made provocation and mockery a hallmark of their style, so of course people react more strongly to whatever they do. It would be unrealistic to expect otherwise.
Given that Trump's preference for a well-done steak was turned into a major story, one would imagine a legitimate crisis of transparency like this would have been made news.
No one normal cares about youtube video rankings. That's why there wasn't any website like 81m.org site tracking white house youtube videos and hiring bots to downvote them.
It just silly. Regular people who are interested in politics care about actual laws passed, relationships with other nations etc, not some yotube, twitter, fb wars.
I would assume YT stats often go through some sorts of spam detection ... thus this?
I see YT stats change up and down a lot. On videos with lots of likes and dislikes, and videos with almost none. I just assume it's spam / false positive detection / database synchronization... or whatever system at work.
Maintaining any kind of stats like this that matter / on a huge site has to be a 'try to keep it in the ballpark' at best scenario / endless adjustments.
It doesn't take much deep thinking to realize how these numbers are going to change for all sorts of legitimate reasons, in any direction. Maybe a number of times, tomorrow even?
Heck maybe if there was spam had nothing to do with the videos / source of the videos even? If I'm going test some up / down vote bottling ... probably going to pick a big target to see how far I can push the numbers.
This is standard operating procedure, mainly dealing with deleted accounts, and reducing spam or bot actions on the site. 3.9M removed over the course of 500+ videos for a global account for one of the largest countries isn't all that surprising. They also remove likes and comments for spam reasons as well, which this "article" (if you can call it that) just so happened to ignore, I can't imagine why.
YouTube prunes accounts quite often, even streamers and boy bands will have their numbers rapidly changed to deal with spam or bots. This has been normal operating procedure for over a decade.
Agreed. I got down to the "So odd for the most popular resident ever!" and realized I got duped into reading some ideologue's rant against the other team and now I have to question the data provided and wonder what context got casually discarded.
This whole "Youtube deletes dislikes on White House videos" has been part of the alt right narrative for some weeks now, right next to "if masks work then why do we need to stay at home".
Do you know how the sausage is made? I would assume only certain Youtube employees would know the actual truth. If you look at the About page for 81m.org, he writes about how he verifies with other large Youtube channels. Not that I disagree but the quickness of your dismissal is a bit unfair to the OP.
This guy also has a bunch of posts on the same site denying climate change and rehashing conspiracy theories about fraudulent votes for Biden. I wouldn't take anything he says very seriously.
I'm a little shocked that this is getting so much traction here. The site (81m-dot-org) seems to be a right-wing "the election was stolen from Trump" site. Their "about" page says:
It is true that Biden won the most votes cast for a U.S. presidential candidate, amassing about 81 million votes. Such a popular president should have some truly epic YouTube numbers. Let's keep track. I'm sure we won't see anything weird happening, such as dislikes being thrown out in the wee hours of the morning.
When you're dealing with "voting" on the internet (like Reddit, YouTube, or HN do), there's going to be vote manipulation. Some of it you might be able to catch early on. Some of it you'll end up fixing with batch jobs that identify "huh, there seems to be a few hundred users using this IP address and all watching this video and hating it at exactly the same time."
This is presented in a way that infers political partisanship, but without any evidence for or against that argument.
- No statistics for previous administration's like/dislike removal rate. Was it lower? Higher? We don't know.
- No statistics for YouTube like/dislike removal rates on other kinds of political or non-political videos. Maybe this is extraordinary behavior for YouTube, or maybe not. We don't know.
In other words, this is flame bait that people can read into whatever they want to confirm their biases. With a heavy dose of partisan editorializing ("Disgusting!").
At best, it shows a need for more principled study from someone else.
The left wasn't keeping track of how many of their dislikes were removed from the previous administration. Why not? Because it was a pitiful and legit amount. That's why! Think!
Unrelated to the topic, from your comments and post, you seem like you are a rather smart person, but you are also accepting a lot of negativity in your life. I really do suggest you disconnect for a bit from TV, news, and the Internet and look for creative outputs for your energy that aren't Red vs Blue.
Well, I know I didn't keep track 2017-2020 and I don't know any site that did. Do you have site that actually did?
If I would own 81m.org site which only purpose is to monitor whitehouse youtube channel (very specific) and believed that the end justifies the means, why wouldn't I hire a botnets to help with that effort?
If my botnet works I can show that general population is dissatisfied. If youtube removes my spam I can use that to show that YouTube is partisan. Either way I win.
If we wanted to be truly scientific about this and make for an interesting conversation, we would try to get to the bottom of this instead of shooting down the OP.
The big question that is missing to be answered is what it looks like generally on youtube, especially with highprofile youtube channels with a lot of people who dislike them, it is rather rare where more than half of all viewers dislike a video.
Hmm, you cant really be sure if this is from bots or not. However, youtube has shown in the last 5 years that they actively want to promote the left and shown that they do not like anyone that has different opinions.
I recall the trending page in the US being spammed with pro leftist videos that were unpopular while major popular videos from more conservative channels werent even showing up.
Or all the demonitization of almost any conservative channels 4-5 years ago. It has gotten better though, oof.
Want to give a skeptic opinion about covid or masks? They'll delete your video or demonitize it.
How about them spamming their own channel with leftist propaganda videos with the likes/dislikes disabled because it was getting 90% dislikes?
I see a lot of people refuting this data, yet provide no counter evidence. Let's remove politics from this, is YouTube being deceptive? I am honestly asking.
I have noticed in the past controversial videos have their views/dislikes reset. Anecdotal, but I would like to see if there is truth to vote and view manipulation.
Hell look at sometimes how manipulated the trending pages are. I remember for months low view count Jimmy Kimmel clips were boosted to trending. Logged in or not. Seems like mainstream Hollywood stuff is far more likely to trend.
YouTube is silent about explaining why this happens. It can't all possibly be spam and bots.
65 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadHow do they actually do that? First I hear about it.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PGm8LslEb4 ha he has more videos about that
Otherwise I don't think anyone would care.
Let alone how that ties to its ratings.
You're out in the weeds with these characterizations and connections.
With that in mind, and keeping in mind CNN is a pretty mainstream news source, it's pretty obvious that a large segment of CNNs viewers did care about such scandals during the previous administration, which means quite a bit of non-tweeters did.
If this is the biggest thing the right media can sensationalize, I say the current administration is doing pretty damn good.
Current admin jokes about nuking Americans.
But I guess making peace with enemies is worse yeah
[1]: https://www.foxnews.com/tech/trump-complains-twitter-purged-...
I've never heard of OP's article and don't see much reporting on this by major "journalists."
Because the left didn't complain. Which is odd, because they're pretty good at that.
It just silly. Regular people who are interested in politics care about actual laws passed, relationships with other nations etc, not some yotube, twitter, fb wars.
I see YT stats change up and down a lot. On videos with lots of likes and dislikes, and videos with almost none. I just assume it's spam / false positive detection / database synchronization... or whatever system at work.
Maintaining any kind of stats like this that matter / on a huge site has to be a 'try to keep it in the ballpark' at best scenario / endless adjustments.
It doesn't take much deep thinking to realize how these numbers are going to change for all sorts of legitimate reasons, in any direction. Maybe a number of times, tomorrow even?
Heck maybe if there was spam had nothing to do with the videos / source of the videos even? If I'm going test some up / down vote bottling ... probably going to pick a big target to see how far I can push the numbers.
Makes sense.
This is standard operating procedure, mainly dealing with deleted accounts, and reducing spam or bot actions on the site. 3.9M removed over the course of 500+ videos for a global account for one of the largest countries isn't all that surprising. They also remove likes and comments for spam reasons as well, which this "article" (if you can call it that) just so happened to ignore, I can't imagine why.
YouTube prunes accounts quite often, even streamers and boy bands will have their numbers rapidly changed to deal with spam or bots. This has been normal operating procedure for over a decade.
Agreed. I got down to the "So odd for the most popular resident ever!" and realized I got duped into reading some ideologue's rant against the other team and now I have to question the data provided and wonder what context got casually discarded.
You're welcome to think that nearly twice as many diskikes were removed as remain is normal. I disagree. Thank you.
Why though?
What's normal and can't abnormal things happen?
I see likes and dislikes change over time even on videos with very few likes and views.
I just assume it is some sort of cleanup system.
Things like the removal of 1 star reviews [0] when an app rating goes down. They call this "review-bombing" protection.
And perhaps the easier option for this kind of official videos is disabling comments and like/dislike buttons for them.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22255245/google-deleting-...
It is true that Biden won the most votes cast for a U.S. presidential candidate, amassing about 81 million votes. Such a popular president should have some truly epic YouTube numbers. Let's keep track. I'm sure we won't see anything weird happening, such as dislikes being thrown out in the wee hours of the morning.
When you're dealing with "voting" on the internet (like Reddit, YouTube, or HN do), there's going to be vote manipulation. Some of it you might be able to catch early on. Some of it you'll end up fixing with batch jobs that identify "huh, there seems to be a few hundred users using this IP address and all watching this video and hating it at exactly the same time."
This blog linked here has such posts as "Something Rotten in Georgia" where she questions the accuracy of Georgia election results (https://phzoe.com/2021/01/06/something-rotten-in-georgia/) and "81 Million Ballots" where she says that "there is ample reasons to suspect that foul play bumped [the number of votes for Biden] by several million" (https://phzoe.com/2021/03/12/81-million-ballots/).
Are we really upvoting right-wing propaganda now?
Some of us aren't privy to such magical knowledge, and so we'd like a look see.
- No statistics for previous administration's like/dislike removal rate. Was it lower? Higher? We don't know.
- No statistics for YouTube like/dislike removal rates on other kinds of political or non-political videos. Maybe this is extraordinary behavior for YouTube, or maybe not. We don't know.
In other words, this is flame bait that people can read into whatever they want to confirm their biases. With a heavy dose of partisan editorializing ("Disgusting!").
At best, it shows a need for more principled study from someone else.
Unrelated to the topic, from your comments and post, you seem like you are a rather smart person, but you are also accepting a lot of negativity in your life. I really do suggest you disconnect for a bit from TV, news, and the Internet and look for creative outputs for your energy that aren't Red vs Blue.
If I would own 81m.org site which only purpose is to monitor whitehouse youtube channel (very specific) and believed that the end justifies the means, why wouldn't I hire a botnets to help with that effort?
If my botnet works I can show that general population is dissatisfied. If youtube removes my spam I can use that to show that YouTube is partisan. Either way I win.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PGm8LslEb4
A incident like this also happened in the past and there youtube said that they remove malicious or spammy votes, though did not seem to comment on the concrete case. https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/jan/25/did-youtube-r...
I recall the trending page in the US being spammed with pro leftist videos that were unpopular while major popular videos from more conservative channels werent even showing up.
Or all the demonitization of almost any conservative channels 4-5 years ago. It has gotten better though, oof.
Want to give a skeptic opinion about covid or masks? They'll delete your video or demonitize it.
How about them spamming their own channel with leftist propaganda videos with the likes/dislikes disabled because it was getting 90% dislikes?
Ah well, nothing you can do anyway.
I have noticed in the past controversial videos have their views/dislikes reset. Anecdotal, but I would like to see if there is truth to vote and view manipulation.
Hell look at sometimes how manipulated the trending pages are. I remember for months low view count Jimmy Kimmel clips were boosted to trending. Logged in or not. Seems like mainstream Hollywood stuff is far more likely to trend.
YouTube is silent about explaining why this happens. It can't all possibly be spam and bots.