Users noticed inconsistencies in the “likes” and “dislikes” of videos on the official White House channel on YouTube: thousands of negative votes for Biden videos simply disappeared into the same aether as ballots for Trump. 

Criticism of the new president is obviously still undesirable even after his assumption of power; we all know the big tech companies go to great lengths to silence unwanted critics. On YouTube, this is done by subtle “adjustments” to the ratio of positive and negative votes for videos. For example, a Twitter user shared the following screenshots:

And on the adolescent dominated Reddit, too, there are similar images in which users recorded the drastic shrinkage of “dislike” votes:

You can see that Sleepy Joe Biden’s video had collected around 12,000 dislikes after 90,938 views – after a further 7,360 people had seen the video, it was suddenly only 2,500 dislikes, almost 10,000 fewer than before.

YouTube sees dislikes as spam

When asked about this “phenomenon”, YouTube said that the dislikes were spam. How exactly YouTube defines spam here is unclear, however. They didn’t want to give out details or explanations.  What it probably means is “any critic of Sleepy Joe.”