In a strange twist of events Justin Bieber’s popularity has come back to haunt him. The overwhelming success of his hit song ‘Baby’ has attracted over 1.5 million dislikes on Youtube. His video has well over half a billion views, 583,376,364 to be exact. This however doesn’t it make it immune to Youtube’s algorithm that weighs heavily the number of likes vs. dislikes of a video to decide whether or not to pull it.
Youtube’s decision has created a an uproar among Justin Bieber fans on Twitter, where they’ve created the trending topic Dear Youtube to voice their displeasure. Some have even gone so far as to say they will boycott Youtube and jokingly threatened bodily harm to the website’s staff.
I’ll be keeping my eyes on this one as a social media case study. By giving power to the masses to control what content stays on Youtube they’ve managed to piss off millions of their users. Only to have those same users start a social media campaign to block them from carrying out the site policy. This has turned into a battle of influence. Youtube may find themselves in the position of re-writing their terms of service in light of this protest. If the video gained half a billion views that means it has value, financial and otherwise. They can’t allow internet trolls to down vote it despite it’s overwhelming popularity.
Justin Bieber is a social media power house, his millions of ’Beliebers’ have joined forces and are sending a strict warning to Youtube.
Dear YouTube, unless you want to lose half of your income and your users. I suggest you #dontdeletebabyless than a minute ago via Twitter for iPhone 
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JasonBorn™
TheBieberHelp
You can follow me here: @KevinMinott
