The Korean Pop band BTS recently released a new music video called “ON”.
Owing to the huge fanbase of the particular music genre, it became a smash hit across YouTube and acquired several million views within hours of its release.
However, fans of the band, commonly known as the “BTS Army”, claimed that YouTube reduced the number of views on the music video.
While the video, as of writing, has 49 million views, the BTS Army says that the original view count was north of 100 million, and that anywhere between 67 to 100 million views were removed by YouTube.
Most of the screenshot evidence posted by BTS fans pointed to the fact that 67 million views were gone.
As a result, the fans started trending the hashtag #YTBring67MBack, resulting in a horde of tweets calling YouTube out for deleting the views.
YouTube, in response, tweeted saying that it was normal to see a difference in view counts, as the company keeps revising the count to reflect accurate views.
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“It’s normal to see views slow down, freeze, or adjust while we verify that those are real and accurate. Here’s more info on how this works: https://yt.be/help/Jgao. If you meant something else, let us know!” tweeted YouTube, responding to a user who tweeted saying, “youtube keeps deleting views”.
YouTube’s reply did seem like a reasonable explanation of the situation but fans aren’t entirely convinced.
They were repeatedly accusing YouTube of being “corrupt” for deleting the views.
https://twitter.com/omermeroz/status/1233358027442487297
“You really expect us to believe an mv that had 10M views in the first 24h would have only 40M 20hrs later? Especially when an mv by the same group reached 74M in 24hrs with less people watching it. Either your algorithm sucks or your corrupt, choose which story you want to tell,” wrote a Twitter user.