Hacker News Reader

Comment by klipklop | Hacker News Reader

Odd that a certain political party got a large amount of downvotes on all their videos and YouTube removes the publics ability to see them soon after.

View on HN

I can’t say I’ve checked but I’d have assumed every partisan political video gets a tonne of downvotes. I assume you’re referring to some sort of recent organised thing though?

Not organized at all, completely grassroots.

Check the like/dislike ratio for any mainstream media video which features an obvious politically slanted view on some topic.

The problem here is that people are using the like/dislike ratio to indicate what may be biased content masquerading as 'objective news'. It just so happens that this (accurate) method is flagging the left leaning propaganda that YT wants to propagate.

It's smart in a gross way. They can materially reduce the risk of being regulated by pandering to them.

Very unlikely they care about regulation. Wojcicki is a fully paid up technocrat globalist - she's ideologically aligned with that party.

Who whips who? Media or parties?

Except they considered the change years before Biden was president: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/1/18207189/youtube-dislike-a...

This Trump rally from The Hill, where he tells his followers to get the vaccine that he got, garnered 1.5k likes and 1.3k dislikes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huQdxDnQkac

Here Trump hints at a 2024 run on the Today show, but it has more likes than dislikes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BU7MWvwTOzw

Here a Fox affiliate covers a recent Trump rally, but it has 10 times more likes vs dislikes! Didn't anyone tell them about the grand Youtube conspiracy?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi4niom7se8

Does that fit your narrative or no?

I am alluding to the current party in the White House that gets every video downvoted into oblivion. Some sites accused YouTube of deleting the downvotes.

Now they are giving up and just hiding them now.

Is there any evidence that the government pressured YouTube into making this change? Or this is just blind speculation on your part?

Here's evidence that the videos are subject to organized brigades: https://libredd.it/r/Conservative/comments/l2d9ma/youtube_de...

It's just blind speculation. There is absolutely no historical precedent of Big Tech corporations implementing censorship controls at the behest of governments. Anyone claiming otherwise is spreading misinformation and should be censored.

Absolutely. It's a matter of public health.

Government already admitted to pointing Facebook to accounts to be deplatformed. Government and social media collusion is now best assumed to be going on. All that matters now is how much the companies are incentivized to push back. The answer: not much.

If this change happened or not due to such collusion is secondary to the thing worth noting: it would not be surprising if it did, it would be consistent with the governments positioning if it did, and it would also be hard to prove if it did, and if it was proven it would be vociferously defended by legions of commentators and the media. All that would need to happen was for the government to suggest the downvotes on pro-vax vids were contributing to deaths and ergo liability, and suggest the whole feature serves as a mechanism for disinformation they may be liable for in general, perhaps criminally so if the feature can be traced back as a proximate cause of something like the capital riot. Poof.

Yep, no evidence.

> so if the feature can be traced back as a proximate cause of something like the capital [sic] riot

Then they would have removed OAN's video claiming Trump won the presidency, but they didn't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4c5dYDD9xw

My point isn’t that is what is happening now, I was pointing out a hypothetical that is believable enough to think may happen in the future.

Are you imagining a parallel reddit thread with 30 votes between members of government and YouTube? Why would that be public?

Direct, of course not. Circumstantial, sure:

>Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his administration. [...] The government and Google shared engineers, lawyers, scientists, communications specialists, executives, and even board members. Google has achieved a kind of vertical integration with the government: a true public-private partnership. [0]

>MS. PSAKI: Sure. Well, I would say first, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that [The White House is] in regular touch with social media platforms — just like we’re in regular touch with all of you and your media outlets — about areas where we have concern [1]

>So it is possible YouTube removed dislikes it deemed "spam" from videos posted by the White House account, including the Jan. 20 press briefing video. But there is no evidence YouTube deliberately removed authentic dislikes from the video to support the Biden administration or silence critics. [2]

[0] https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close...

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/202...

[2] https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/jan/25/did-youtube-r...

That is speculation, not circumstantial evidence. Thank you for providing sources that say "there is no evidence YouTube deliberately removed authentic dislikes."

You have to make reasonable inferences when evaluating the potential for collusion between what are arguably the two most powerful entities in the world.

Wait, so should platforms do nothing against creators that are brigaded and review bombed?

A video being organically downvoted to oblivion is way different than a bunch of users organizing on 4chan, Reddit, or being directed by their favorite parasocial media personality to go bomb a video/product.

If I was YT I wouldn't want to bother policing this crap and just take away all the incentive to do it in the first place.

I am alluding to the current party in the White House that gets every video downvoted into oblivion.

Solid analysis backed up by data..

All uploaders have the option to hide upvotes and downvotes, even retrospectively.

I don't think the GP's narrative was that this exclusively happens to the Democrats. Just that it happens way more on the current White House's videos than it did on the last administration's. Plucking examples where Republican videos were downvoted intensely does not refute an argument the OP wasn't making in the first place.

Sure, it's easy to find examples of dislike brigades for the current White House channel: https://libredd.it/r/Conservative/comments/l2d9ma/youtube_de...

I was just wondering if there was any evidence that the government was involved in UI change. There isn't.

I believe he's referring to the other party, with videos like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcRVR63dnDA

And this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tYl5C9PufY

Good point, there's clearly no conspiracy against the right.

...but the recent video of Biden getting sworn in has more likes than dislikes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2305DGsceE

He's been president for nearly a year. Youtube is really bad at this conspiracy stuff I guess.

I do believe political pressure is what is partially guiding this move.

Do you have any evidence at all?

Can only speculate based on the various complaints the party had about all the downvotes the WH channel gets.

Do you think anybody below the VP level of YouTube would be told? Guess what, no google employee talked about PRISM either.

Agreed, you have no evidence for your claim, so it can be dismissed entirely.

Yes we should totally take google at their word when they say it's not politically motivated.

They can say whatever reasoning they want, that does not necessarily make it true. Google has a well defined history of lying publicly or hiding the things they do. Dragonfly, PRISM... These things take brave whistle blowers that have their lives ruined to reveal.

If I said, "I am going to eat this fried twinkie because it is for my health" would you take that as a factual statement (that twinkies are healthy) just because some PR department repeated it on my behalf? Google saying they are not doing this on behalf of the current administration means nothing. Nobody reasonable expect them to really be honest with the public/users anymore.

or perhaps its merely co-incidental but because some people/activists are always so thirsty about politics _any_ event can be correlated to their political lens.

Most pro-vaccine videos are also massively disliked on YouTube, despite the fact that the vast majority of people support vaccines.

I'm guessing you're a conservative, and you don't want dislikes to go away because you think it's great that pro-democrat videos get downvoted, but you can't base real public opinion on YouTube dislikes. It's massively astroturfed

> I'm guessing you're a conservative

Please stop. Most conservatives support vaccines. Your idea of conservatives has an insidious skew that's just plain wrong.

The person I was replying to was talking about dislikes on the YouTube of a 'particular political party'. That's what I was referring to

> Most pro-vaccine videos are also massively disliked on YouTube, despite the fact that the vast majority of people support vaccines.

You mean the vast majority support vaccines because they will lose their jobs if they don't "support" them?

Well the country clicked over to greater than 50% of people with at least one dose on May 25, 2021 so it seems like the majority did support vaccination before the mandates.

You're living in a bubble if you think that people only support vaccines because of Mandates. Even in America, which is one of the more vaccine hesitant countries, the majority of adults got the vaccine long before any mandates were introduced

Reply on news.ycombinator.com