I do think that Google/YouTube is strongly biased, but I'd like to urge caution on definitively declaring that you know exactly what is going on in all cases.
For reference: I'm a programmer who has dealt with similar systems before and has done some looking into how YouTube's system works.
YouTube's systems for counting stuff (views, likes, dislikes) don't display all data in real-time. What I believe happens is that they write all activity to a set of servers, and then have a periodic out of band process that analyzes their logs, removes bot traffic from the counts (various search engine crawlers, fake view businesses, etc) and attempts to come up with some close approximation of what the actual unique view/like/dislike count is.
You can observe this yourself by seeing the occasional phenomenon where a new video (whether its politics or skateboarding) will have more comments or likes than views. Their system is optimized for eventual consistency, not absolute real time display of stats.
What could be observed here is this. They might have designed their systems this way on purpose to allow them to obfuscate and manipulate data easier, but there's at least a smidgen of plausible deniability on YouTube's part here and there's no way to definitively know without access to their logs.
I do think that Google/YouTube is strongly biased, but I'd like to urge caution on definitively declaring that you know exactly what is going on in all cases.
For reference: I'm a programmer who has dealt with similar systems before and has done some looking into how YouTube's system works.
YouTube's systems for counting stuff (views, likes, dislikes) don't display all data in real-time. What I believe happens is that they write all activity to a set of servers, and then have a periodic out of band process that analyzes their logs, removes bot traffic from the counts (various search engine crawlers, fake view businesses, etc) and attempts to come up with some close approximation of what the actual unique view/like/dislike count is.
You can observe this yourself by seeing the occasional phenomenon where a new video (whether its politics or skateboarding) will have more comments or likes than views. Their system is optimized for eventual consistency, not absolute real time display of stats.
What could be observed here is this. They might have designed their systems this way on purpose to allow them to obfuscate and manipulate data easier, but there's at least a smidgen of plausible deniability on YouTube's part here and there's no way to definitively know without access to their logs.