YouTube has responded to fans of Korean Pop band BTS – commonly known as the BTS Army – who have accused the video platform of deleting tens of millions views on the group’s new music video, ‘ON’.
The music video became a record-breaker within hours of its release, with 1.54 million viewers tuning in for its premiere on February 27, and 18m within four hours.
At the time of writing – around 24 hours after launch – the video sits at around 46 million views. However, many BTS fans claim that multiple millions of views were deleted from the video, ranging from anywhere between 67-100 million views allegedly gone from the video.
67 million seems to be the common number that BTS fans are stating, posting screenshots or videos of a view count for the video seemingly going down from in the hundreds of millions and got #YtBring67MBack trending the day after on February 28.
After an inundation of tweets, bad reviews and accelerated communication from the BTS fanbase, YouTube has responded to someone who accused them of “deleting views.”
Including a link to an information page on the topic, TeamYouTube on Twitter said: “It’s normal to see views slow down, freeze, or adjust while we verify that those are real and accurate.”
It's normal to see views slow down, freeze, or adjust while we verify that those are real and accurate. Here’s more info on how this works: https://t.co/x3N7d5IYy2. If you meant something else, let us know!
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) February 28, 2020
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This makes sense, considering ‘view-botting’ is, unfortunately, a common practice, and people want to make their viewership figures look higher, so YouTube need to make sure they’re cutting down on any issues of creators manipulating viewcount.
Given how many views the video got in such a short space of time, this explanation for why views might have ‘disappeared’ makes sense, but it can’t be verified whether BTS definitely suffered at the hands of YouTube “deleting views” or not.
As expected, the tweet was met with some criticism, including BTS fans calling them “corrupt” and simply refusing to believe the response.
You really expect us to believe an mv that had 10M views in the first 24h would have only 40M 20hrs later? Especially when an mv by the same group reached 74M in 24hrs with less people watching it.
Either your algorithm sucks or your corrupt, choose which story you want to tell.
— omer meroz⁷ (@omermeroz) February 28, 2020
The response doesn’t give any clear evidence either way, whether views were removed from the video or not for whatever reason.
However, BTS fans seem to have made their minds up and are making their voice heard – demanding YouTube give them their 67 million views back.
