YouTube starts censoring Rons popularity

[TheDuke]

I first started noticing it when when Ron Pauls YouTube statistics on www.techpresident.com fell from +300% to +20% in 6 hours time 2 days ago (it had been an average +300% for 2 weeks).

Now others are starting to pay attention to the number of views the official videos of ronpaul2008dotcom and the ones he has favorited do not seem to show progress, not even with obvious activity (adding of comments and ratings isn't disabled). It is not a refresh issue, as seen in tests of posters by posting the exact numbers when they freeze and they match. Sometimes they add 59 or so, and then it's down for a couple of hours again.

YouTube is censoring the popularity of these videos, probably so they don't appear in their top rated, top viewed, ect. ratings... You take a look yourself and you'll see.

[Therion]

Maybe it's just that so many videos have been made about Ron Paul that people can't keep up? Let's get a bit more evidence before we throw around the C-word.

Besides, Youtube has a huge amount of bugs. It rarely if ever operates perfectly.

[TheDuke]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peBGJwE9NXo In this popular one it's quite obvious, lets see how long the 127,191 stands.

[aravoth]

I noticed this on my vids as well. Not only that but some people's comment have been getting removed. People wrote to me and yelled at me for censoring comments. But I have never removed a single one. Then My # of views stopped updating. It refrshes once in a while, but never seems to catch up with the rateings. I know this is happening because one of my vids is linked to an outside site that has a running counter of how many times it was viewed through that site. It says over 4000, yet on youtube it says it only been seen on that site just over 1000. Very odd indeed.

[Seth M.]

i dont know necessarily that it is censoring.. as stated above i think it may be bugs...

example:

i click on my subscriptions page yesterday and it said 2228 votes for Ron Paul's newest video. i click and go to his channel and the same video shows 2229 votes. i logout and look again. subscription page shows 2228 channel page shows 2229 votes... same thing :confused:

?

nothing is perfect but i will from now on take screen shots of anomolies and say hey i caught a bug.. so they can fix it.

[TheDuke]

And there's a bug too that censors the comments too right... no, first I was concerned you guys would think I was one of the paranoids that escaped from the Alex Jones-site, so I waited 48 hours to report, and I'm not the only one that noticed.

It works perfectly in the hands of everybody that wants to say:
- Ron Paul was just a hype, look, his views aren't going up anymore, they've forgotten about him.
- That all the positive comments on RP are just ALL positive because the poster of the video removes the bad ones.

Maybe I am paranoid, but it wouldn't suprise me.

[Therion]

Maybe you have a point. I'll certainly look into it...

[Seth M.]

hey Duke.. I would keep a record of as much as possible... send it to them and see what they say.. after all you could compile it all into a video clip if they dont attempt to answer and or correct the issue. :)

[Exponent]

A scientific method of monitoring this would be to also monitor other candidates' videos (Republican or otherwise), as well as a few videos of popular people that aren't associated with politics, and a few popular videos that aren't even associated with specific people, as control groups. If Ron's videos are the only ones showing signs of weird numbers, missing comments, and so forth, then you have a case. But if all you do is watch Ron Paul videos, then you can never rule out the possibility of bugs.

[cujothekitten]

I know for a fact it's bugs. Other people I subscribe to have the exact same problem and they're not even political. This has been an ongoing problem since I've been using youtube (about 1 year with one account and a couple months with my new one). Some people have their view count go down to five with 250 comments and my own comments on videos don't always show up.

Youtube is a huge website with some minor things to fix. Frankly I'm surprised it works as well as it does.

P.s. The view count isn't an instant thing... it refreshes throughout the day.

[TheDuke]

I use YouTube for other purposes too... I never saw things stagnate like that, and I don't see this trend on other "unpopular" subjects at this juncture. It's just Ron Paul, because the other candidate's numbers go up without problems (except ofcourse, not very big numbers :p ).

If their was a problem, they should have been able to fix it by now I guess... the only thing they don't want is Ron Paul dominating their "news and politcs" section like he has been doing for the last few weeks, because their is a serious drop in that area (the area of honours, obviously because the number just don't rise).


Edit: I hope so :D Now I'm gonna make a phonecall, but I gotta look out with what I say because I know the government is listening :p

[ratsbew]

I HIGHLY doubt that there is any 'censoring' going on. You have to remember that Youtube has hundreds (thousands?) of individual servers in order to keep up with demand. One video may be spread between many servers and it does take a while to synchronize all of the data, especially on a fast moving video.