Are people really using votes like that? You putting your trust in deciding quality in a vote count? There's so much wrong with that.
[0]: https://phzoe.com/2021/01/27/white-house-youtube-dislike-man...
All that article shows is that the votes are manipulated by users too, there's no signal in down vote brigading like that
It's certainly possible that Youtube is acting in a political manner and is preferentially deleting real dislikes, but this post hardly proves that.
I didn't make that claim.
My main point is that the article suggests that this manipulation is selective, and while Youtube might indeed be selectively manipulating White House videos, the methodology used doesn't show that.
Here's a simple question which should be easy to answer, if you've actually approached this in an impartial way: does Youtube also remove likes or dislikes from other videos in a similar way? If the answer is "yes", then the conclusion becomes much less politically interesting.
PS, I think you're overestimating the amount of people who care about White House channel videos. E.g. the press briefing from 3/29/21 has less than 34,000 views. I guess some of the Trump rally attendees forgot to show up to their downvote party.
81m.org tracked other channels. Different behavior.
It's clear that people is this discussion are focused on different types of videos, and the varied responses to the removal of downvotes reflect this. I'm focused on board game videos, which are the only videos I watch. A large number of downvotes on a board game video indicate that the video includes major rules mistakes. So when I see many downvotes, I simply play another video. I'm not going to bother performing a thorough investigation of the quality of one board game video that has a lot of downvotes.