About 2.5 million dislikes have been removed from Biden videos on the official White House channel since Biden became president, according to an analysis.
YouTube allows users to like or dislike videos. However, on some occasions and for some channels for the past two years it has had a policy for removing likes and dislikes it deems spam.
“We have policies and systems in place to ensure that the engagement on YouTube is authentic, and remove any fraudulent metrics,” a spokesperson for the platform told Reclaim The Net, but did not provide details on the criteria used to conclude a like or dislike is spam.
It appears YouTube is using the policy on videos posted by the White House. However, it’s not a balance of both likes and dislikes being removed – only the dislikes are disappearing.
According to data posted online on the website 81m.org, whose owner has tracked engagement on the White House channel since January 26, nearly 2.5 million of the 3.7 million dislikes on the 300 videos posted have been removed.
Per the data, on average, YouTube has been removing about 8,000 dislikes on each video. And no single like was removed.
Since Biden assumed office, White House videos have been getting thousands of dislikes shortly after their posting. Even with YouTube’s intervention, on average, each video has about six times more dislikes than likes.
YouTube recently announced that it was considering removing dislikes from all videos and was going to test it for some users.
