Google-owned YouTube’s plan to remove the “dislike” button from videos, the easiest and bluntest way for users to express their disapproval with the content of a video, should not be viewed in isolation. It’s part of a long-running trend of elites seeking to prohibit ordinary people from speaking back to them.
YouTube dislikes are disliked (haha, get it?) by elites for the same reason that audience scores on movie reviewing sites and comments sections on media websites are disliked by them. It gives ordinary people the opportunity to call their supposed betters out on their bullshit.
Those elites, by the way, include YouTube itself. The most-disliked video of all time is still YouTube’s official “2018 rewind” video, a compilation of highlights from the previous year that was widely panned by YouTube users for favoring mainstream celebrities over YouYube personalities like PewDiePie. YouTube’s 2019 “rewind” video also broke into the top 10 most disliked videos, and a third — 2017’s — made it into the top 50.
Other historically disliked videos include Gillette’s boycott-sparking “toxic masculinity” ad, and a Microsoft commercial featuring alleged artist Marina Abramovi, whose alleged art is praised by elites but disliked by wide swathes of the public.
And then there’s Joe Biden. By any objective standard, the White House’s videos on YouTube are not popular. Their viewcounts are a fraction of what President Trump enjoyed, and the like-to-dislike ratio looks atrociously bad for Biden’s videos.
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