5 ms·

White House YouTube Dislike Manipulation

65 points by auganov 6y ago

formerly_proven 6y ago
Totally not dislike bots.
- michaelmior 6y ago
  Assuming sarcasm, that was my first thought as well. Although it's possible there is something nefarious going on, I assume the White House attracts a disproportionate number of bots and this could potentially be accounted for by purge of dislikes by bots.
- II2II 6y ago
  As bad as it looks, it could be an automated attempt to protect the system from manipulation. As such, I find the author's conspiratorial tone somewhat unjustified. (For example, the comment about 1 am probably has little to do with doing it when people are unlikely to notice it and more to do when maintenance is done.)
  - cecja 6y ago
    The author is doing research on one point of a system and is ignoring the whole rest of the system ie. youtube. It's pseudo science at it's best and and should be banned from hn.
xmodem 6y ago
The article implies something nefarious going on here, but there are plenty of entirely rational innocent explanations. i.e. the videos are attracting a large quantity of spam dislikes, and YouTube is bulk-removing them.
- dominotw 6y ago
  > a large quantity of spam dislikes what exactly is a 'spam dislike' . I don't see how thats a valid explanation.
  - marcinzm 6y ago
    Probably bots, people who do nothing but dislike videos, Indian sweatshops that are human bot farms, dislikes driven by social media posts calling for users to add dislikes, etc.
    - dominotw 6y ago
      > people who do nothing but dislike videos > dislikes driven by social media posts calling for users to add dislikes this is not spam. how does youtube knows which dislikes are driven by 'social media post' ? > Indian sweatshops that are human bot farms someone is paying sweatshops to dislike whitehouse youtube? How do you know this ?
      - ardy42 6y ago
        >> people who do nothing but dislike videos >> dislikes driven by social media posts calling for users to add dislikes > this is not spam. Also how you think youtube knows if a certain user is disliking because they read a social media post ? I believe Reddit calls similar activity "brigading," and it's against the rules there.
      - marcinzm 6y ago
        >this is not spam. Dislikes are there to help human users of Youtube (and the AI recommender systems of Google) not to be some sort of god given metric of anything. Spam is anything which makes dislikes less useful as metric for those things. Users who dislike everything aren't a useful metric. >Also how you think youtube knows which dislikes are driven by 'social media post' ? A sudden jump in dislikes with a referal tag of <insert social media>. Probably mixed with their knowledge of those user's other Youtube browsing behaviors. And Google's absurd knowledge of your internet browsing behaviors via its massive analytics network. I'm sure there's whole teams doing nothing but this at Youtube and I suspect they have very sophisticated methods at this point.
- topspin 6y ago
  > the videos are attracting a large quantity of spam dislikes Prior to the bulk-removal the dislikes are tracking the views; the dislike growth curve is a close function of the view count curve. That is unlikely to happen if the dislikes are bulk spam. We'll be told it's 'spam' or 'bots', and Youtube will rely on this as the plausible explanation should they bother to address it at all, but the inconvenient truth is that the most likely explanation for the dislikes is viewers. Otherwise one must posit a sophisticated spammer that is carefully tailoring their dislikes to camouflage their activity. I suspect the only meaningful response we'll get is a throttling of the API used to do the analysis.
JohnHaugeland 6y ago
This website also contains climate change denial and scare quotes around the word scientist. We should be more skeptical of sites like this.
- pcf 6y ago
  This is whataboutism and trying to discredit the researcher. Either analyse and critique the very concrete work displayed here, or don't say anything at all.
  - cecja 6y ago
    What research? He cherry picks one popular channel on youtube which gets dislike bombed and presents it as a conspiracy. You are spreading FUD this is no research this is just pseudo science with an agenda.
- teh_klev 6y ago
  Examples?
  - grive 6y ago
    https://phzoe.com/2020/03/04/dumbest-math-theory-ever/ https://phzoe.com/2020/03/04/dumbest-math-theory-ever/ https://phzoe.com/2020/10/05/geothermal-to-the-moon/ https://phzoe.com/2020/10/05/geothermal-to-the-moon/ https://phzoe.com/2020/02/20/two-theories-one-ideological-other-verified/ https://phzoe.com/2020/02/20/two-theories-one-ideological-ot... There are may others. It's all over the place. The author denies the Stefan–Boltzmann law that contradicts her model meant to prove most heating is due to geothermal. She also does not believe in Fusion within the Sun, or that photon are particles (only waves, which is linked to the thermal radiation denial). Additionally, the author mocks and attacks anyone contradicting her in the comments. Her argumentation revolves around throwing new theories after new theories that could help explain her impossible results, expecting others to provide the contradiction. All-around extremely exhausting to argue with, bad faith, aggressive and ideologically driven. Amidst all this, many election fraud allegations on the blog, beyond the subtext implying manipulation in this post article.
gtk40 6y ago
It seems obvious there would be plenty of "legitimate" dislikes coming, as probably a lot of people who followed this YouTube channel in the past 4 years were Trump supporters, and now the channel features Biden. Trump supporters still subscribed would dislike this content. I wonder if the same happened at the last transition.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  > Trump supporters still subscribed would dislike this content. I wonder if the same happened at the last transition. I'd be surprised if it hadn't. The bigger question is whether YouTube manipulated the dislikes back then, too.
- yonaguska 6y ago
  > Trump supporters still subscribed would dislike this content. I wonder if the same happened at the last transition. Presumably you could unsubscribe. Which is not the case with instagram. If you followed the White House account, or you decide to follow the archived account for Trump, you are periodically made to follow the current White House account for Biden. Even if you block the user, it will unblock and re-follow you.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > It seems obvious there would be plenty of "legitimate" dislikes coming, as probably a lot of people who followed this YouTube channel in the past 4 years were Trump supporters, and now the channel features Biden. Trump supporters still subscribed would dislike this content. I wonder if the same happened at the last transition. I don't know about YouTube, but I've read that the 2017 transition and the 2021 transitions were different on Twitter: 2017: Obama's institutional twitter accounts (e.g. @POTUS) were archived, but Trump inherited the followers in his new @POTUS account. 2021: Trump's @POTUS was archived, but Biden's new @POTUS didn't inherit Trump's (and Obama's) followers. He had to start from scratch. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/technology/biden-white-house-twitter-account.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/technology/biden-white-ho...
hkougju 6y ago
YT also removes millions of likes/views, for example on K-pop videos which are fake-streamed by their "armies" of fans. There are tutorials on the net on how to "ethically", "honestly" increase view counts on your favourite band, with stuff like no more than 1 watch every 20 minutes: https://twitter.com/bstwings_views/status/1296462456022237186 https://twitter.com/bstwings_views/status/129646245602223718... So it's not easy to tell what's going on here, they could be inauthentic dislikes.
marcinzm 6y ago
There's still like 10x the dislikes then the likes. So a pretty crappy conspiracy if it doesn't even get a positive like to dislike ratio. Or it's a whole bunch of bots/spam mixed in with legitimate dislikes.
ericb 6y ago
Is it possible a "DisLike" botnet would follow a similar pattern? Find a video, dislike for a while, find the next, repeat.
smcl 6y ago
For a while YouTube didn’t report the exact number of views, likes and dislikes. So someone viewing a video would only getting an approximate value for each or with a deliberate small +/- offset. Is it possible that’s what’s going on here? I find it hard to believe YT is engaging in “manipulation” of a stat that frankly doesn’t really matter if you’re an account like the White House.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  >> of a stat that frankly doesn’t really matter if you’re an account like the White House. I don't agree. I think these numbers matter more than we realize. I believe that many politicians today are using Twitter/Youtube/Facebook likes as modern Gallup polls. Manipulation of the numbers could result in actual policy changes. Say there is a video about net neutrality, or the breakup of the social media giants. I honestly think all sorts of people in government will be looking to the popularly, or lack thereof, as a gauge of public support for the content of the video. So, imho, manipulation of likes/dislikes is becoming very serious.
  - smcl 6y ago
    I think you are mistaken if you believe anyone in government cares about number of likes and dislikes on any YouTube videos and uses this to base their position on any given policy. Even if they cared about traditional old-school polls you’d probably have Medicare for All, the USA would be completely out of Iraq and Afghanistan and you’d be able to buy Cannabis legally. I doubt they’d ignore the known popularity of these things but suddenly care about social media likes and dislikes.
jhanschoo 6y ago
Other comments here have pointed out that the drop is likely due to a periodic cleaning of bot votes, against the blog author's premature, sarcastic insinuation that some nefarious manipulation is being performed at YT (there is, but it's not nefarious but to combat third-party manipulation that misleads the user and abuses the platform). Perhaps it is also of note that the author performs a naive analysis of limited climate data in a linked post to draw a conclusion against climate change.
oliwarner 6y ago
The videos all seem to have far more dislikes than likes (very different from the article). They actually seem to be quite aggressively disliked, disproportionately from standard polling anyway. Maybe there is something nefarious happening, but not at YouTube.
CawCawCaw 6y ago
Has this been observed before on any other videos?

65 points by auganov 6y ago

formerly_proven 6y ago

Totally not dislike bots.

michaelmior 6y ago
Assuming sarcasm, that was my first thought as well. Although it's possible there is something nefarious going on, I assume the White House attracts a disproportionate number of bots and this could potentially be accounted for by purge of dislikes by bots.
II2II 6y ago
As bad as it looks, it could be an automated attempt to protect the system from manipulation. As such, I find the author's conspiratorial tone somewhat unjustified. (For example, the comment about 1 am probably has little to do with doing it when people are unlikely to notice it and more to do when maintenance is done.)
- cecja 6y ago
  The author is doing research on one point of a system and is ignoring the whole rest of the system ie. youtube. It's pseudo science at it's best and and should be banned from hn.

xmodem 6y ago

The article implies something nefarious going on here, but there are plenty of entirely rational innocent explanations. i.e. the videos are attracting a large quantity of spam dislikes, and YouTube is bulk-removing them.

dominotw 6y ago
> a large quantity of spam dislikes what exactly is a 'spam dislike' . I don't see how thats a valid explanation.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  Probably bots, people who do nothing but dislike videos, Indian sweatshops that are human bot farms, dislikes driven by social media posts calling for users to add dislikes, etc.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    > people who do nothing but dislike videos > dislikes driven by social media posts calling for users to add dislikes this is not spam. how does youtube knows which dislikes are driven by 'social media post' ? > Indian sweatshops that are human bot farms someone is paying sweatshops to dislike whitehouse youtube? How do you know this ?
    - ardy42 6y ago
      >> people who do nothing but dislike videos >> dislikes driven by social media posts calling for users to add dislikes > this is not spam. Also how you think youtube knows if a certain user is disliking because they read a social media post ? I believe Reddit calls similar activity "brigading," and it's against the rules there.
    - marcinzm 6y ago
      >this is not spam. Dislikes are there to help human users of Youtube (and the AI recommender systems of Google) not to be some sort of god given metric of anything. Spam is anything which makes dislikes less useful as metric for those things. Users who dislike everything aren't a useful metric. >Also how you think youtube knows which dislikes are driven by 'social media post' ? A sudden jump in dislikes with a referal tag of <insert social media>. Probably mixed with their knowledge of those user's other Youtube browsing behaviors. And Google's absurd knowledge of your internet browsing behaviors via its massive analytics network. I'm sure there's whole teams doing nothing but this at Youtube and I suspect they have very sophisticated methods at this point.
topspin 6y ago
> the videos are attracting a large quantity of spam dislikes Prior to the bulk-removal the dislikes are tracking the views; the dislike growth curve is a close function of the view count curve. That is unlikely to happen if the dislikes are bulk spam. We'll be told it's 'spam' or 'bots', and Youtube will rely on this as the plausible explanation should they bother to address it at all, but the inconvenient truth is that the most likely explanation for the dislikes is viewers. Otherwise one must posit a sophisticated spammer that is carefully tailoring their dislikes to camouflage their activity. I suspect the only meaningful response we'll get is a throttling of the API used to do the analysis.

JohnHaugeland 6y ago

This website also contains climate change denial and scare quotes around the word scientist. We should be more skeptical of sites like this.

pcf 6y ago
This is whataboutism and trying to discredit the researcher. Either analyse and critique the very concrete work displayed here, or don't say anything at all.
- cecja 6y ago
  What research? He cherry picks one popular channel on youtube which gets dislike bombed and presents it as a conspiracy. You are spreading FUD this is no research this is just pseudo science with an agenda.
teh_klev 6y ago
Examples?
- grive 6y ago
  https://phzoe.com/2020/03/04/dumbest-math-theory-ever/ https://phzoe.com/2020/03/04/dumbest-math-theory-ever/ https://phzoe.com/2020/10/05/geothermal-to-the-moon/ https://phzoe.com/2020/10/05/geothermal-to-the-moon/ https://phzoe.com/2020/02/20/two-theories-one-ideological-other-verified/ https://phzoe.com/2020/02/20/two-theories-one-ideological-ot... There are may others. It's all over the place. The author denies the Stefan–Boltzmann law that contradicts her model meant to prove most heating is due to geothermal. She also does not believe in Fusion within the Sun, or that photon are particles (only waves, which is linked to the thermal radiation denial). Additionally, the author mocks and attacks anyone contradicting her in the comments. Her argumentation revolves around throwing new theories after new theories that could help explain her impossible results, expecting others to provide the contradiction. All-around extremely exhausting to argue with, bad faith, aggressive and ideologically driven. Amidst all this, many election fraud allegations on the blog, beyond the subtext implying manipulation in this post article.

gtk40 6y ago

It seems obvious there would be plenty of "legitimate" dislikes coming, as probably a lot of people who followed this YouTube channel in the past 4 years were Trump supporters, and now the channel features Biden. Trump supporters still subscribed would dislike this content. I wonder if the same happened at the last transition.

commandlinefan 6y ago
> Trump supporters still subscribed would dislike this content. I wonder if the same happened at the last transition. I'd be surprised if it hadn't. The bigger question is whether YouTube manipulated the dislikes back then, too.
yonaguska 6y ago
> Trump supporters still subscribed would dislike this content. I wonder if the same happened at the last transition. Presumably you could unsubscribe. Which is not the case with instagram. If you followed the White House account, or you decide to follow the archived account for Trump, you are periodically made to follow the current White House account for Biden. Even if you block the user, it will unblock and re-follow you.
ardy42 6y ago
> It seems obvious there would be plenty of "legitimate" dislikes coming, as probably a lot of people who followed this YouTube channel in the past 4 years were Trump supporters, and now the channel features Biden. Trump supporters still subscribed would dislike this content. I wonder if the same happened at the last transition. I don't know about YouTube, but I've read that the 2017 transition and the 2021 transitions were different on Twitter: 2017: Obama's institutional twitter accounts (e.g. @POTUS) were archived, but Trump inherited the followers in his new @POTUS account. 2021: Trump's @POTUS was archived, but Biden's new @POTUS didn't inherit Trump's (and Obama's) followers. He had to start from scratch. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/technology/biden-white-house-twitter-account.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/19/technology/biden-white-ho...

hkougju 6y ago

YT also removes millions of likes/views, for example on K-pop videos which are fake-streamed by their "armies" of fans. There are tutorials on the net on how to "ethically", "honestly" increase view counts on your favourite band, with stuff like no more than 1 watch every 20 minutes: https://twitter.com/bstwings_views/status/1296462456022237186 https://twitter.com/bstwings_views/status/129646245602223718... So it's not easy to tell what's going on here, they could be inauthentic dislikes.

marcinzm 6y ago

There's still like 10x the dislikes then the likes. So a pretty crappy conspiracy if it doesn't even get a positive like to dislike ratio. Or it's a whole bunch of bots/spam mixed in with legitimate dislikes.

ericb 6y ago

Is it possible a "DisLike" botnet would follow a similar pattern? Find a video, dislike for a while, find the next, repeat.

smcl 6y ago

For a while YouTube didn’t report the exact number of views, likes and dislikes. So someone viewing a video would only getting an approximate value for each or with a deliberate small +/- offset. Is it possible that’s what’s going on here? I find it hard to believe YT is engaging in “manipulation” of a stat that frankly doesn’t really matter if you’re an account like the White House.

sandworm101 6y ago
>> of a stat that frankly doesn’t really matter if you’re an account like the White House. I don't agree. I think these numbers matter more than we realize. I believe that many politicians today are using Twitter/Youtube/Facebook likes as modern Gallup polls. Manipulation of the numbers could result in actual policy changes. Say there is a video about net neutrality, or the breakup of the social media giants. I honestly think all sorts of people in government will be looking to the popularly, or lack thereof, as a gauge of public support for the content of the video. So, imho, manipulation of likes/dislikes is becoming very serious.
- smcl 6y ago
  I think you are mistaken if you believe anyone in government cares about number of likes and dislikes on any YouTube videos and uses this to base their position on any given policy. Even if they cared about traditional old-school polls you’d probably have Medicare for All, the USA would be completely out of Iraq and Afghanistan and you’d be able to buy Cannabis legally. I doubt they’d ignore the known popularity of these things but suddenly care about social media likes and dislikes.

jhanschoo 6y ago

Other comments here have pointed out that the drop is likely due to a periodic cleaning of bot votes, against the blog author's premature, sarcastic insinuation that some nefarious manipulation is being performed at YT (there is, but it's not nefarious but to combat third-party manipulation that misleads the user and abuses the platform). Perhaps it is also of note that the author performs a naive analysis of limited climate data in a linked post to draw a conclusion against climate change.

oliwarner 6y ago

The videos all seem to have far more dislikes than likes (very different from the article). They actually seem to be quite aggressively disliked, disproportionately from standard polling anyway. Maybe there is something nefarious happening, but not at YouTube.

CawCawCaw 6y ago

Has this been observed before on any other videos?