Joe Biden isn’t yet airbrushing critics from history books as did that other Joe, Stalin, but his government-censorship proxies are “disappearing” criticism. It’s not just Big Tech suppression of conservative commentary and Web comments, either, but now also, even, the elimination of YouTube “dislikes.”
The issue is that despite China Joe supposedly getting 81 million votes — the most of any president in history (ahem, cough) and 15 million more than Barack Obama — he has just never seemed very popular. His campaign rallies always looked a bit like the Chernobyl area circa 1987, and polls had to be pressure-cooked to give him illusory leads.
For another example, Biden was upset that President Trump’s POTUS Twitter account followers wouldn’t automatically be transferred to him, and on that platform he currently “boasts 16% fake internet followers (which are bots and the like), which is quite a high count, particularly with Twitter now scrubbing accounts for fake followers,” writes commentator Monica Showalter. “Many pols have been known to put them there to appear more popular than they are (see Kamala Harris), so one can just guess the story with Biden.”
Now comes this: A woman named Zoe Phin has examined Javascript code and learned that YouTube is sending Biden videos’ “dislikes” out into the cornfield. As JoNova reports (edited for grammar, typos, and punctuation):
In newer Whitehouse videos, the downvotes continue. Clearly the Social Media controllers have a problem. One week later, and YouTube doesn’t just unlist the videos — the Swat team has started deleting the deplorable votes instead.
Zoe Phin downloaded the data every 80 seconds and graphed it. Within six hours of posting a video, the dislikes were nearly ten times higher than the likes — but then the magic eraser of unpopularity gets to work.
It’s just like voting, right?
“Phin’s code work from examining four videos, complete with charts showing those famous precipitous drops associated with Biden voting tallies, can be viewed here,” Showalter also informs.
To be fair, Biden’s “support” was more an anti-Trump vote than a pro-Joe one. Still, none of this passes the smell test and again points to how, as I’ve said, we witnessed last election the jump-the-shark version of vote fraud.
Yet there are two things to note here. First, while GoogTwitFace censorship is now a major story and has intensified with time, it’s nothing new.
For example, I reported in 2009 on how YouTube was “caught red-handed cooking stats for Obama” with respect to a video portraying him in a bad light. I mentioned that a close friend of mine who was a frequent YouTube visitor had gone to the site at 11 a.m. on September 23 or 24, 2009, and noted that the video’s hit counter had recorded a total of at least 196,000 page views (and probably more).
When I’d gotten to it later, however, it had 363.
Oh, at the same time it had 2,279 comments.
This is implausible because everyone who leaves a comment visits the video page.
When I’d last checked, the comments were up to 3,018. But even 36 minutes after that, the views were still at 363.
As I wrote at the time, what “no doubt happened is that YouTube’s censors realized that Drudge had linked up to the video and got busy with their usual voodoo.”
This matters because if a video receives tremendous traffic, it appears on YouTube’s “Popular” videos page or its “Most Viewed” page. This means it will get infinitely more exposure — it will be seen not just by the people who who’ve driven it onto the front page but also those who wouldn’t normally know about it.
Another older example of establishment tech manipulation involves The New American (TNA) itself. Our website features Facebook’s “Like” button at the top of every article (it’s common to news sites today); this indicates how many Facebook users read and “liked” the article. Well, for more than a year during the 2014-2015 period, the likes at TNA articles would accumulate — and suddenly disappear. One of my most popular articles reached 30,000 likes, and then, lo and behold, the next time I checked it, the reading was zero.
One might consider this a glitch, but it occurred consistently to TNA articles, and I’d never observed the phenomenon at a mainstream-media site. Likes, likes, and more likes — and then “Poof!” back to zero.
Why does this matter? Since likes indicate readership level, as well as reader affection, they’re a good metric for popularity. Moreover, studies have shown that people are influenced by what’s popular. Create the illusion that an article is barely read and its content is more likely to be dismissed as a fringe view.
Popularity also matters ego-wise to leaders, who too often are narcissistic. This is one reason why, implausible though it is, the world’s Saddam Husseins, Hugo Chávezes, and Adolf Hitlers will jump the shark, cooking their approval ratings to 99 percent.
The moral of this story is also a warning: Power obviates plausibility.
