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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]