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The website https://81m.org/ has developed a tool to periodically check the latest videos uploaded to the Official White House YouTube channel using YouTube's API, and counts the increases of likes/dislikes. It then observes for any decreases in dislikes, and calculates a "Manipulation amount" percentage per video, based on the number of dislikes removed compared to the original increases.

The website claims that other channels such as PewDiePie have no manipulation, and their running dislike count is identical to the reported numbers on YouTube. However, on White House videos, the page displays manipulation amounts on videos ranging from a few dozen percent, to several thousand percent.

As discussed in the question Does YouTube delete video dislikes?, YouTube occasionally removes both likes and dislikes, and claims that it is to combat fraudulent activity or click farms.

Is there any information why YouTube is doing so on this channel, and especially to the scale that it's happening?

robbieperry22
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    Are you asking if youtube removes likes/dislikes? There has been many articles saying that they have and will remove them if it appears they are manipulated in one way or the other such as targeting campaign to drive the video in one direction or another. I don't think there is any question of them doing this, we just don't know why. https://nypost.com/2021/03/31/youtube-is-testing-removal-of-the-dislike-counter-on-videos/ – Joe W Apr 13 '21 at 20:28
  • Highly related: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/43234/37236 – Laurel Apr 13 '21 at 20:46
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    Does this answer your question? [Does YouTube delete video dislikes?](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/43234/does-youtube-delete-video-dislikes) – Avery Apr 13 '21 at 20:50
  • Modified the question to expand upon the related question – robbieperry22 Apr 13 '21 at 21:08
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    What scale is it supposedly happening on? From the link it appears that videos have none to a few thousand removed. In fact it doesn't even appear to claim that there is something malicious behind the removals. – Joe W Apr 13 '21 at 21:10
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    It's possible there are more bad actors trying to discredit the white house then there are bad actors trying to discredit pewdiepie. – Erik Apr 14 '21 at 06:47
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    I’m voting to close this question because it is asking a motivation question, about which we can only speculate – Oddthinking Apr 14 '21 at 12:29
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    This should _not_ be closed as a duplicate on an old question since Youtube is [currently](https://techcrunch.com/2021/03/30/youtube-tests-hiding-dislike-counts-on-videos/) messing with the dislike system again. – pipe Apr 14 '21 at 15:55
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    @pipe: It wasn't. – Oddthinking Apr 15 '21 at 01:52

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