If you haven’t heard of it, YouTube has announced that although they will retain the dislike button, they will remove the counter that shows how many people dislike the video. YouTube users have expressed their anger at this decision, but its creator seems to be weighing it, and he disagrees.
According to YouTube, the purpose behind it is to prevent travelers they think they don’t like from using buttons to locate creators they don’t like. They claim that it is used as a form of harassment, and by eliminating the dislike counter, they are stopping this bullying.
Speculation about the true purpose behind hiding the number of dislikes began to circulate, and many people concluded that whenever their advertising campaign provokes the anger of a group of people, it is in the interest of protecting the brand from dislikes.
For example, Gillette’s short film about “toxic masculinity” is so unpopular that many people express their dissatisfaction by dislike the videos they post to YouTube. At the time of writing, the video had more than 1.6 million dislikes to 835,000 likes. It’s not a good idea for a brand to encounter this kind of opposition to your campaign.
Gillette also lost its parent company Procter & Gamble, More than 5 billion U.S. dollars With this thoughtful stunt, I digress.
Interestingly, at the time of writing, the announcement video on YouTube has more than 151K dislikes and 14K likes itself, but again, I digress.
Jawed Karim, the co-founder of YouTube, also commented, calling it a “stupid idea.”
Comments can be found on Karim’s YouTube channel, where only one video can be found; about 16 years ago, the first video uploaded to YouTube was Karim Commenting Elephant. In the description of the video, Karim edited it as “When every YouTuber agrees that deleting dislikes is a stupid idea, it might be. Try again, YouTube.”
To be honest, YouTube’s approach is stupid. The dislike button has been abused in the past. It is true, but what constitutes abuse should not be confused with what constitutes rejection by the audience. Looking back at Gillette’s ads, men (and even women) have every right not to like videos that portray men as toxic and disappointing. This is an insulting advertisement produced by a radical feminist company, and Gillette’s (former) client is right to disagree that the company would do such a thing.
However, if we step back a little further, we will find that it may not have helped YouTube make this decision to protect the brand. This is probably only a small part of it, but I suspect this is the main reason.
The real reason is that it may try to protect the Biden administration and its allies, and the Biden administration and its allies have received constant negative votes in almost every video that tries to promote them. For example, the Fauci documentaries of National Geographic and Disney Plus dislike more than they like, and these numbers are fully displayed. In addition, almost every video released by the White House now is underestimated.
Of course, the comments have been closed.
YouTube, especially its parent company Google, has hardly tried to hide their position in the political arena. They also made it very clear that when it comes to narratives about Fauci and the COVID-19 virus, they will not defend the left-wing narrative. To show that they were serious, they suspended Senator (and doctor) Rand Paul’s account in a video in which he discussed the science surrounding masks.
Paul fought back, questioning “when YouTube became a government department”, and attacked YouTube and Google for thinking they were “arbiters of truth.”
(read: Rand Paul gave a good point to YouTube after they suspended him for COVID-19 talks)
YouTube can claim that it is eliminating the number of dislikes for noble reasons, but all the evidence points to an attempt to suppress dissent to the left-wing narrative and reason.
