Tracking the White House YouTube channel | Hacker News Reader

Tracking the White House YouTube channel

81m.org

36 pointsSQL221933 comments

Looks like your typical alt-right conspiracy woo. There's no way in hell I'd take the publicly listed like/dislike quantities at face value for something like this. I assume there's a ton of caching and the distributed nature of it all to take into account.

Thinking along the lines of how reddit upvotes fluctuate.

"YouTube regularly removes any spam likes or dislikes from your videos. It may take up to 48 hours for the numbers to be updated. Find more info about Likes and dislikes report here: https://goo.gl/eA6f1i "

https://mobile.twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/10800251185025...

too bad they cannot remove blatant crypto scam livestream videos or prevent accounts from being hijacked to promote such scams .

The amount of likes changed, frequency and consistency seems very odd

What's the claim here? That someone at YouTube is artificially altering dislike counts on White House videos? It's hard to tell from the headline link or from the blog post that supposedly inspired it (in the About section).

If you read more of the authors' posts, she's some sort of mildly numerate election truther that thinks there's a wide ranging conspiracy to favor Joe Biden including changing election results in Georgia and altering the dislikes (but not the likes?) on Youtube videos.. also seems to believe that random observations about temperature and snowfall disprove global warming and she has the pseudocode to prove it.

I don't know why it would be surprising. Youtube does it all the time. I've see it happen on videos about movies, pop culture, and more - not just politics.

everyone is in a media bubble. So its not that surprising.

For context, I was watching The White House YouTube channel during the Obama, Trump, Biden administration.

Every video posted is subjected, instantly, to what I assume are automated comments and, in my opinion, unusual like/dislike ratios. The comments originate from a wide variety of accounts of varying ages, usually with no published video or text, following channels of international brands and small entities so obscure that I wouldn't doubt they were chosen at random. The content is generally support for the current President. "[US Flag Emoji]" features prominently. In my experience, total comment activity dropped off after the last election. It looks like comments are disabled on recent videos.

So, if I had to guess, this site grapples with the removal of the accounts that would normally make those comments, and all of their associated likes and dislikes. It would be interesting to follow up on every comment, checking whether the account was changed or deleted after those comments.

Before jumping to the conclusion that YT is in the White House's back pocket, consider that this could be explained by common platform behavior like spam and malicious accounts being deleted along with their dislikes.

> Such a popular president should have some truly epic YouTube numbers. Let's keep track. I'm sure we won't see anything weird happening, such as dislikes being thrown out in the wee hours of the morning.

This intro in the about section and the conclusions the author make, makes me question the whole thing. Why does the author think his numbers are real, when it could just be that YouTube deleted dislikes made by bots after some time?

The blog post they link to as inspiration has charts on it. The charts show that, before YouTube gets involved, dislikes outpace likes by 10:1 or more...this does not pass the sniff test. They're removing spam, not hiding dissent.

https://phzoe.com/2021/01/27/white-house-youtube-dislike-man...

Exactly.

Obviously it passes because the channels of communication will be very different (eg. FB pages) for both groups, and will be affected by different feed algorithm rules

Also people are way more motivated to disagree or leave a bad review than positive

That page clearly shows YT manipulation

I think the reasons for the discrepancy are obvious:

Much in the way that Reddit will fuzz vote counts, the public like/dislike counts will stay up on accounts that are shadow banned and get removed in batches so that the accounts which are bad actors will not know for certain if their vote still counts or not.

So what you've documented here is evidence of which videos are most botted.

Methodology details how and why:

https://81m.org/about/

Why would YouTube risk the optics of manipulating likes for a few percentage points, sometimes, in Biden's favor?

Is it possible there are other explanations?

The internet hates the Whitehouse youtube channel it is hardly a secret. All stories about new covid restrictions are deeply hated by the vast majority of all who comment and vote on video likes or dislikes there. You can be pretend all you want about it and flag it. But it is a fact and it is never going to change.

Documenting this is important because many of the recent lawsuits allege government collusion with tech companies in censoring. Documenting a one sided pattern like this will go a long way to convince courts and juries.

If there was manipulation happening, it would be much more subtle than this. This is either amateur hour, or something innocuous happening.

Surprising how low some of the view counts are - for example the Kult TTRPG AP I was on last week has 250+ views.

I'd love to hear from an Engineer whose task is to do this. I can't imagine how depressing that job is.

I love that whoever created this thinks that some nefarious vote manipulation is going on at YouTube and yet YT just can't muster up enough power, over their own product, to make the "Likes" go in Bidens favor. Also by their metrics, Ted Cruz is the most popular person on the internet. Weird!

Biden /Harris videos got down-voted badly.

> damn...Biden /Harris videos got down-voted badly. I think this shows the importance of good communication when making a case to the public. Had Covid occurred during Clinton's term I'm sure his videos (again, assuming YouTube existed) would have done much better. It's not like YouTube is a bastion of conservatism.

I wouldn't read too much into upvote/downvote counts of political figures' YouTube videos insofar as them being a reflection of reality. They are highly susceptible to brigading and other manipulation.

Even so, its hard to believe this is a ratio the most popular president in history is mustering. 81 million votes after all, you would expect some traction.

I think you're giving YouTube video likes/dislikes way too much credence. Public polling, however unreliable, at least has a methodology meant to reflect some semblance of reality. There's a reason political committees and news organizations aren't looking at Youtube video vote counts to gauge candidate popularity.

What I would like to know is why such a beloved president (or at least mainstream media presents him as one) has such terrible view numbers and likes.

Because the people who dislike him have more reason/incentive to write dislike-bots than the people who like him have incentive to write like-bots.

Or just click dislike, it's not very hard to explain a couple of thousand dislikes from 74 million disgruntled Trump voters

I hear you, but the like:dislike ratio is massive, and IMO too big to be explained by inter-group variance.

You just need a dozen pro Trump pages on FB sharing the video to get those amount of dislikes

The 2 groups follow very different pages, and pro Trump are motivated to show their disapproval

In general people have no reason to share or like these videos, they're not very interesting, from any president or any country

Who the heck would be following, wasting time watching the full video, saying "this is really good", and like it? Not me

It's simple, dislikes are fake. Here's the last video on that channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q3rptB_FJs

At the time of writing this, it has 1062 views, 29 likes, and 687 dislikes.

No non-manipulated YouTube video what so ever has 67% of viewers engaging with it by liking or disliking it.

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