Mon Nov 15, 2021 – 3:39 pm EST
(LifeSiteNews) — YouTube has announced that “dislike” counts will no longer be publicly visible beneath videos, in a move the Google-owned platform says is meant to curb harassment of smaller accounts. Conservatives suspect it’s actually meant to spare the embarrassment of some of the most powerful voices in the country.
“[W]e’re making the dislike counts private across YouTube, but the dislike button is not going away,” YouTube announced November 10, ostensibly based on experiments that found a reduction in “people work[ing] to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos” if the fruits of their efforts cannot be seen.
Uploaders will still have access to the dislikes on their own videos for content-assessment purposes, and viewers can still leave dislikes to “tune their recommendations and privately share feedback with creators.”
“We heard during the experiment that some of you have used the public dislike count to help decide whether or not to watch a video,” the YouTube Team said. “We know that you might not agree with this decision, but we believe that this is the right thing to do for the platform. We want to
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