New Delhi: On Monday, the live stream of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address at the inaugural session of Governor’s Conference on National Education Policy Monday saw a response that seems to be becoming a trend with his online videos — dislikes dominating likes.
The video saw 12,000 dislikes against 11,000 likes during the live stream. Over the next couple of hours, the likes figure surged ahead, but just about.
This came on the back of two worse occurrences over the last week.
The PM’s monthly address Mann Ki Baat on 30 August and then his interaction with IPS probationers later garnered a similar response, with the former topping the dislike metric among his videos at a staggering 283,000 (against 211,000 likes). The latter met with 29,000 dislikes (28,000 likes).
This trend of growing dislikes compared to likes is clearly discernible in the wake of the NEET-JEE controversy, which has seen vocal students call for postponement of the scheduled exams this month even as the Modi government has refused the demand.
ThePrint scanned 105 videos live streamed this year on the official YouTube channel of PM Modi — not to be confused with the PMO India channel. Only the two videos mentioned above have earned more dislikes — both came after the row broke out.
Of these, the Mann Ki Baat episode is the most disliked (as well as liked) on the channel, with the highest number of ratings. In the address, which can be read here, the PM chose not to talk about the NEET-JEE row, or the students’ demand.
While this kind of response is a sort of novelty on the PM’s official channel, the BJP has blamed the Congress for a “conspiracy” to target the channel.
BJP spokesperson Bizay Sonkar Shastri said it is an organised Congress conspiracy, and most of the dislikes are from outside India, even from countries where there is no presence of Indians.
Earlier, the party’s IT cell in-charge Amit Malviya had said that only 2 per cent of the dislikes on the Mann Ki Baat video were from India, the rest 98 per cent were bots, pinning the blame on Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.
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!
However, data from YouTube suggests that only 2% of those dislikes are from India…— Amit Malviya (@amitmalviya) August 31, 2020
Also read: Subramanian Swamy attacks Amit Malviya, calls for sacking of BJP IT cell members
The changing trend
Typically, the official Narendra Modi page live stream videos receive more likes than dislikes. Even in live streams that have thousands of dislikes, the likes always outweigh them.
For instance, a live stream video on “PM Modi performs Bhoomi Pujan for Ram Mandir in Ayodhya” has 26,000 dislikes, but that’s only one-fifth of 1,58,000 likes.
The PM’s July Mann Ki Baat has 20,000 dislikes, just over half of 39,000 likes.
Even a live stream from last week where the PM delivered a keynote address at US-India Strategic Partnership Forum, has 35,000 likes and 25,000 dislikes.
However, the proportion of dislikes on Mann Ki Baat addresses seems to be growing. The April Mann Ki Baat had 42,000 likes but only 2,500 dislikes.
It is rare for Modi’s live streams to cross 10,000 dislikes. Only 12 videos of the 105 live streams ThePrint scanned had 10,000 or more dislikes.
Besides the examples noted above, the dislikes crossed the 10,000-mark for a couple of live streams during US President Donald Trump’s visit to India in February. In the live stream on “PM Modi addresses the Namaste Trump community programme in Ahmedabad”, there are 18,000 dislikes and 1,75,000 likes.
With inputs from Shanker Arnimesh
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