Prime Minister Narendra Modi shared his message with the citizens of India at 6 PM on Tuesday. The widely-anticipated speech included the Prime Minister detailing the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) preparation in the country, and assuring Indians that the nation is in a much better place with respect to the pandemic than earlier.
Whatever response to the pandemic there might be, the BJP is appearing to parallelly deal with a relatively penny-ante menace — the spectre of 'dislikes' on its videos. A trend which started two months ago with an unprecedented number of 'dislikes' on the YouTube clip for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's monthly 'Mann Ki Baat' address does not seem to be going away anytime soon, since it keeps haunting the saffron camp's official clips on the internet everywhere.
Case in point, during the Prime Minister's 6 PM address this evening, Twitter users chirped in with the fact that the 'dislike' button for the clip on the Bharatiya Janata Party's official YouTube channel clip was turned off quietly after the video amassed around 4.5k dislikes within minutes.
Something like this, which might at first seem like a relatively trivial snag, may in fact have got the BJP somewhat worried at this point. What started as a protest by disappointed students over Modi's decision to skip the issue of entrance examinations being conducted amid the ongoing pandemic, the 'dislike' trend caught on as a bit of a custom.
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.
Videos posted last month by the BJP on its official channel saw ‘dislikes’ outnumbering ‘likes’ by huge numbers, to the point that it might have rubbed off a nerve and triggered the party into not providing the option of hitting the ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ button altogether.
The saffron camp has already resorted to defences like terming it as a 'Congress game plan' to defame the Prime Minister's image to even the IT Cell blaming it all on 'Turkish bots', but the issue, as clearly as it continues to be demonstrated, remains still at large, garnering internet laughs with every address.
