Is YouTube deleting those popular pro-Trump video compilations mocking Democrats and liberals “melting down” over Donald Trump’s 2016 election night win?
No, but a conspiracy theory is gaining traction on Reddit alleging just that.
On /r/The_Donald, Reddit’s main Trump community consisting of more than 650,000 members, a post detailing yet another manufactured case of tech’s “anti-conservative bias” has taken off. “HAPPENING: YouTube is CURRENTLY mass censoring and deleting videos of the 2016 election night meltdown,” the post, which currently has more than 5,000 upvotes, states. “Take a look yourself. What was previously filled with compilations and clips of Democrats losing their minds has been replaced with MSM outlets. Find what you can and save.”
The theory alleges YouTube is both deleting these videos from the platform and “censoring” them from search results for “election night meltdown.”
In the comments on this post, Trump-supporting redditors share their favorite “election night meltdown” compilations — consisting of crying Hillary supporters and TV pundits stunned over Trump’s election night win — while they complain about how they will no longer be able to watch these videos.
“Confirmed,” states the top upvoted comment on the post. “God the left is full of pussies.”
“Disgusting. erasing their pathetic past. it should be available for future generations to see” says another commenter.
One problem for this latest anti-conservative narrative: It doesn’t look like any of the videos were deleted. Almost every single “election night meltdown” example posted in the comments is still up on YouTube. The only video that seems to have been removed is due to the uploader terminating their entire account, which would remove all of their uploaded videos.
“The Young Turks Election Day Meltdown 2016: From smug to utterly devastated.” with over 3 million views is still up on YouTube. “Trump Can't Win, One Year Anniversary Gloatfest” with nearly 2 million views is still live on the platform. The same with “In the Hall of the Trumpen King,” “Liberals react to the 2016 Election result exactly the way you expected,” and many more. None have been deleted from YouTube.
Some redditors did attempt to point out that the videos were still there, but those comments received fewer upvotes. In addition, the post alleging the false claim keeps rising up the /r/The_Donald ranks as users keep upvoting the accusation.
But what about the “election night meltdown” YouTube search results? Conservative redditors claim the search query once brought those beloved compilations up top. Now, a search of the term on YouTube delivers results from Fox News, CBS News, MSNBC and other mainstream media outlets first. The current top result is this CNN video.
Mashable reached out to YouTube to find out what was going on with these search results. A YouTube spokesperson told us in a statement that “We make regular changes to search on YouTube and some of these changes have included looking at different signals to promote news sources when people enter news-seeking queries."
YouTube also directed us to a blog post from earlier this summer detailing some of the news-related changes that we’re now seeing implemented here.
We were also able to confirm that there has been no mass deletion of “election night meltdown" videos. Additionally, when it comes to the YouTube search, each user will be served unique results based on their own varying interests, history, and many other additional factors implemented by YouTube’s algorithm.
Consider this yet another false claim of anti-conservative bias in tech debunked. We look forward to the soon-to-be-announced Congressional hearing and presidential tweetstorm on “election night meltdown” videos coming shortly.
