VeeJay 
Many of you, like me, may have noticed that suddenly, You Tube videos do not have any thumbs downs or dislikes. After a few days, I wondered what was going on. Was this just my computer? Was You Tube hacked? Did You Tube discontinue this out of some sort of politically correct “no-more-red-pens-everyone-gets-a-participation-award-so-nobody’s-thin-skinned-feelings-get-hurt-anymore” tactic?
Allow me to begin with a few clarifying points.
- The dislike button is still viewable and a viewer is able to dislike any videos they wish
- The dislike hit counter information will still be shared with the video’s content creator
- The number of dislikes will simply no longer be visible to the viewing audience.
According to You Tube, this decision was made to, “…boost the confidence of its content creators and shield them from ‘dislike attacks’ as it begins to hide thumbs down counts on videos.” One spokesman added, “We also heard directly from smaller creators and those just getting started that they are unfairly targeted by this behavior — and our experiment confirmed that this does occur at a higher proportion on smaller channels.”
This all sounds pretty kosher—the executives over at You Tube care about the “little guys.” Because this is all about a handful of complaints from brand new content creators who think the world is against them by disliking their pet cockatoo videos out of brute spite, right? And You tube executives CARE about the rights and feelings of their content creators, right!? (Never mind the thousands of loyal content creators whose constitutional rights of free speech were violated when their channels were deleted without warning).
What is really going on here, folks, is You Tube’s horror over the disproportionate imbalance of dislikes to likes on all their sensational fear-porn COVID videos. I don’t know about you, but I can’t stand to watch or listen to the mainstream news clips on You Tube that are hyping up the Omicron variant or the vaccination mandates. But I will click on the stories, immediately pause or mute the video, and go straight to the uproariously hilarious, wonderful, witty, patriotic American vitriol being spewed at the disinformation in the comments section. And I know I’m not the only one because it was not at all uncommon on these videos to see 5 millions views with 2000 thumbs up and over 12,000 thumbs down and 9000 comments, most of which were mocking COVIDgate and the clot shots to scorn.
But this is dangerous to the narrative! Before you even click on a video, or even if you never click on it at all, you can see the “voice of the people” right there in black and white. The dislike button was the dead give away that tens of thousands of Americans on You Tube think this whole COVID/Vaccine agenda is a bunch of hooey, socialistic nonsense. And those kinds of statistics have the power to sway public opinion.
There is a fallacy by the name of Argumentum ad populum. This philosophical theory postulates that an idea or a point-of-view must be true if the majority of the people believe it to be true. In our postmodern world, this fallacy often works against the biblically religious and the politically conservative people groups. Our “news” is full of lies and disinformation and with “science” that is not backed up by the scientific method or by the facts. Stories are simply reported, and if enough of the populace takes the bait, then that factoid, belief system, or piece of information becomes fact!
But here we have a rare instance of Argumentum ad populace working in our favor, and it’s got those execs over at You Tube sweating bullets. So, under the dishonest guise of “caring about their content creators” we have the dislikes being hidden from public view. NOT because it hurts people’s feelings when we “harass” them by clicking on an icon that conveys we didn’t enjoy their video…but because the elites don’t want popular opinion working against their agenda. After all, it’s pretty hard to convince the masses that everyone is scared to death of the Omicron variant, when a video has 10K dislikes to every 1K likes.
So, let’s chalk this latest move in the You Tube arsenal off to yet another affront to our freedom of speech–because that is exactly what it is.
Contributor
