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Does Youtube Remove Dislikes for Political Videos You Hate?

Pratick Roy
9 min readMar 20, 2021

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A simple computer science based analysis for dummies and otherwise.

Introduction ( Will tell you, if reading this post is worth your while )

Over the past year I have had multiple discussions with friends from different ends of the political spectrum, who have uncovered a conspiracy of how big websites like Youtube and Facebook are “bought” by Political parties who intentionally reduce the Dislikes on their leaders posts and videos. Ex:

Two images of Mann Ki Baat on the official BJP YouTube channel. The first was taken at 1:33am on 31 August and the second at 2:06am(image: via YouTube)

For the first few times, I tried to explain why such changes in Likes/Dislikes count is just how distributed systems work. Then getting tired, I decided to just share some articles on the topic and save myself from the hassle. Hence I set about googling for some articles that explained this phenomenon, but to my surprise, the top results for a number of searches I tried on for this question, were just sites who were shoving more coal into the conspiracy fire (what’s worse is that some of these posts were from legitimate news sites, who have the time and resource to hire, or at the very least reach out to experts, to first get an understanding of how computer systems work before putting out such posts).

So, that is why I am writing this blog. If you wan’t to get an understanding of why…

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Pratick Roy
Pratick Roy

Written by Pratick Roy

Love to Code. Love to Write. Love to Write about Code. SDE-III at Amazon. One Word to Live By — Eudaimonia. Visit Me At : https://pratickroy.github.io/.

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