YouTube Switcharoo Backfires Yugely

Posted On January 21, 2021

On the heels of Joe Biden’s inauguration, many social media accounts changed hands. Twitter, after recently banning President Donald Trump, designated the POTUS45 handle for him and FLOTUS45 for Melania Trump. The accounts are archived but available and followers remained with each account. Biden and his wife’s accounts were simply converted to new titles, with significantly fewer followers than the Trumps.

But YouTube was another story entirely. 

The White House has a YouTube account, sharing videos of press conferences, notable events, and other pertinent information. Without announcement, YouTube archived the Trump White House account and converted the regular account to Biden. As a result, the Trump White House Archived channel had no subscribers until word spread; it’s already notched 35K subscribers in just one day. 

People who were already subscribed to the White House channel found all the Trump-related videos gone and a handful of Biden videos in their place. It quickly became clear that most subscribers were Trump supporters – hilariously, each video garnered twice as many “dislikes” as “likes.” Thousands of negative comments appeared on each video and the video of the inauguration garnered 17K dislikes, 4K likes, and only 350K views. For the “most popular president ever elected,” those are some dismal numbers. The video was switched to unlisted on YouTube, but you can view numbers here.

After thousands of negative comments, the White House turned off comments on their YouTube channel.

FYI: this is likely unconstitutional, @JoeBiden: "White House has disabled the comment section of the government YouTube channel."

— Robert Barnes (@barnes_law) January 21, 2021