> 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 clos

> 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.