News has been spreading about Google ramping up their censorship standards on YouTube. This time the dislike bar for the video “Trump Is Shutting Down the Government” posted on December 21st, 2018 by Senator Bernie Sanders has been the target of their machinations.
The discrepancy was first noticed by average users in the comment section, and then eventually drama-related YouTubers began picking up the news after being alerted to the odd occurrence of the video only having one dislike after being up for 48 hours.
Dear @TeamYouTube ! pic.twitter.com/JlDiSflzNl
— KEEM (@KEEMSTAR) December 23, 2018
Three hours later Ian Miles Cheong noticed that only three more dislikes were added to the bar.
Is is not obvious? Bernie is the most beloved person in human history. Who could ever dislike him? pic.twitter.com/5agTlB48xD
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) December 23, 2018
Three hours after that, Laszlo MMG LLC posted up a screen cap indicating that the bar had only recorded four dislikes over a two day period.
They know their cover is blown now pic.twitter.com/BJyAOLbVjj
— Laszlo MMG LLC (@MMGinvest) December 23, 2018
Less than an hour after that it managed to go up to eight dislikes.
First, it had 9 dislikes. then I disliked it and now it has 8. lol pic.twitter.com/5SMUWly0Kp
— Qenk: El diablo Uma (@elgranqenk) December 23, 2018
And finally, at present, the number rests at 16 dislikes on the near nine minute video after accruing over 218,207 views.
Obviously there is some kind of foul play at hand given that there are 9,165 comments and 8.5k upvotes.
There are actually more comments mentioning that they’ve downvoted the video than there are downvotes appearing on the video.
This isn’t the first time that Google was caught manipulating the ratios on a video. The most recent example was from this year’s BlizzCon, where the Diablo Immortal video had many of the downvotes removed, as noted over on the Diablo sub-reddit. But it didn’t help Diablo Immortal escape the wrath of downvotes anyway.
(Thanks for the news tip ThyBonesConsumed)
