Many on social media platforms are not happy with Prime Minister Modi. While some remain aggrieved that the Centre did not pay heed to their calls for the postponement of the upcoming National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) and the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), others cite the rising COVID-19 case tally in the country and the grim economic condition.
Against this backdrop, when Prime Minister Modi held his Mann Ki Baat programme and spoke on a variety of topics including Onam celebrations and the Indian toy industry, irate YouTube users took it upon themselves to dislike the video on every channel it was being broadcast from.
At the time of publishing this article, it had received more than 822 thousand dislikes on the BJP's official YouTube handle, 226 thousand dislikes on Prime Minister Modi's YouTube channel and so on. In contrast, the number of 'likes' are rather abysmal.
It must be mentioned that many in the comment section alleged that their 'dislike' had been removed. And while we at FPJ could not verify this, reports suggest that several thousand dislikes have been removed. Incidentally, this can happen when when the YouTube algorithm notices any unusual activity, such as a sudden spike in views and 'likes' and 'dislikes' or when they find a bot.
But as the dislikes rise to several lakhs, BJP leader Amit Malviya has claimed that YouTube data suggests that "only 2% of those dislikes are from India".
"Over the last 24hrs, there has been a concerted effort to dislike Mann Ki Baat video on YouTube... So low is the Congress on confidence that it has been celebrating it as some sort of conquest! (sic)" he tweeted.
Malviya claims that a vast majority of the dislikes came from accounts outside of India. "Bots and Twitter accounts from overseas have been consistent feature of the Congress’s anti JEE-NEET campaign. There is huge spike in activity by Rahul Gandhi’s favourite Turkish bots! What is this Turkish obsession, Rahul?" he wrote.
