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On some YouTube videos, particularly highly downvoted ones, I often see comments asserting that their dislikes on the video are being deleted, either by YouTube or the channel itself.

From the Gillette "We Believe" ad:

Fake dislike count: 761k of dislikes.. Real (but censored) dislikes count: 2.6M of dislikes..

Fake likes, and removing dislikes. I will Never buy Gillette again, i hope they go out of business.

I disliked the video. But, it is automatically getting undisliked. YouTube is being dishonest.

Without YouTube's cloak of censorship, this video would have about 3 million dislikes.

Anyone else noticing that the downvotes are diminishing? As I write, the downvotes are 138,153—yet when I first saw this video a few minutes ago, they were at +140,000 downvotes. Is Susan Wojcicki massaging the numbers at Gillette's urging? Inquiring minds want to know.

A post from the Google Product Forums:

What can be done to stop YouTube's moderators from deleting another 3 MILLION dislikes and another 3 MILLION comments they don't agree with for political reasons from this video?

Reddit: YouTube removing dislikes from rewind:

Don’t be dumb... youtube caches dislikes so that there main servers don’t get pounded with millions of people doing this. Dislike once and wait maybe a hour and check later, it will be there.

I just disliked, and it was at the same number they’re definitely deleting shit

Reddit: Blizzard somehow just deleted 100k dislikes from their Diablo announcement video

Bottom line: when there's a lot of automated activity, Google comes in every now and then and scrubs the data of anything that looks suspect. Not shockingly (given that 4chan has been heavily involved in the uproar) there are a lot of bots involved in this process.

People are saying maybe they cleared bots but why didn't the likes go down either, at least by SOME amount.

So my questions are:

• Is it true that the number of dislikes on a video can and does decrease en masse over time? (It seems to be true.)


• What might be the cause of this? Can a channel delete dislikes? Does YouTube have an automated algorithm that deletes dislikes that seem to be from bots? Does YouTube remove dislikes if you haven't watched 80% of the video? (Obviously, it's possible that users might decide to all undo their downvotes later, but that seems implausible.)

YouTube itself says that it can remove dislikes. From Likes and Dislikes report:

You may see like/dislike counts change as some may be marked invalid and periodically removed from the counts. Learn more about our Likes Policy. [outdated link]

Yes, they do. They will also delete likes, as well.

However, the comments quoted and the general complaints on that video about dislikes going away are based on the claim that Gillette is either paying YouTube to delete dislikes, or that Gillette is doing it, itself.

One reason why YouTube deletes some likes and dislikes is because people often use likes, dislikes, followers, etc on social media to boost their own agendas or careers, so faking or manipulating popularity or unpopularity is pretty common.

To this end, there are business set up with individuals manning banks of devices so a person can deliver hundreds of "clicks" for a paying customer, low tech, or can set up automated programs/bots to simulate activity from different users, for the same result.

To give you a general definition of clicks farms, they can be defined as:

An undercover operation in which individuals fraudulently interact with a website to artificially boost the status of a client’s website, product or service.

This basically means that somewhere in the world there are people that work behind closed doors fraudulently promoting other peoples products and services for a fee. Since the definition is fairly broad, this means that the fraudulent activity can take place on almost any platform although the most popular ones are Facebook and Instagram. It doesn’t matter if the group is selling Facebook likes of Twitter followers, they’re all classed as click farms.

PPC Protect: What is a click farm

It is in the interest of social media platforms to identify this kind of fraudulent manipulation to maintain their own integrity. So in this case, where people who don't like Gillette's ads are seeing nefarious manipulation by either Gillette, or YouTube as a paid proxy for Gillette, really it's the opposite - they are rooting out and screening nefarious and fraudulent activity that they identify.

As noted in another answer -

You may see like/dislike counts change as some may be marked invalid and periodically removed from the counts. Learn more about our Likes Policy.

YouTube: Likes and Dislikes report

Clicking on the "likes policies" hyperlink takes you to -

Artificial Traffic Spam

Anything that artificially increases the number of views, likes, comments, or other metric either through the use of automatic systems or by serving up videos to unsuspecting viewers, is against our terms. Additionally, content that solely exists to incentivize viewers for engagement (views, likes, comments, etc) is prohibited.

YouTube:Spam, deceptive practices and scams policies

It's been previously documented that "glitches" can also alter the like/dislike ratio on a large scale, for example, a Justin Bieber video (including, bizarrely, adding dislikes to likes), so it's entirely possible:

https://heavy.com/social/2013/05/youtube-glitch-removes-dislikes-adds-likes/

Given YouTube control the stats behind the scenes, they can hypothetically do anything on likes/dislikes (similar to the 301 views cap). As for why it might be occurring, one can only speculate just short of an internal leak.