YouTube Shenanigans: Ron Paul Ad Gets Distorted View Counts Before Iowa Caucus

It seems Youtube is back to it's same old tricks again by distorting the view counts of an ad published recently by Ron Paul's Presidential campaign team just before the Iowa Caucus kicks off. The video was uploaded on Dec. 28, 2011 as shown in the screenshot taken and as you can see, the view count remains at 303 views while it's received several thousand "likes."

To be perfectly clear, it is not abnormal to see the view count stop at 303 or 301 views when a video is becoming popular because this is done by the Youtube team intentionally while they verify the views are legitimate which is understandable. Typically, if a new video is becoming popular, the view count will be in real time up to 301 or 303 views then it will stop counting. Once Youtube verifies the legitimacy of the views, which usually takes a few hours to a day, the view count will be updated every few hours according to Youtube which is the typical experience as I've seen from all my uploads that have gained popularity. But this video was uploaded a week ago!

YouTube's Policy According To It's "Help Section" :

What is a view?

A view occurs when a person watches your video. In order to preserve accuracy in view counts, we identify irregular playbacks such as spam and remove these from the view count.

How often do view counts update?

Newly uploaded videos are updated in real time. When videos become popular, they are updated every few hours.

My view count isn't updating. What's happening?

For popular videos, the counts are updated every few hours; if you're still getting views, you should see them soon.

This isn't the first time this is happened to videos related to Ron Paul. Many people have had their videos removed completely by Youtube and some have even had their accounts deleted after uploading related videos about Ron Paul which Youtube has never responded to after inquiry.

It's obvious on some levels that Google (Google owns Youtube) has some political biased as strong supporters of the controversial SOPA bill and the Protect IP Act which have shown how easy politicians who have very little technical knowledge who wrote these bills were easily manipulated or lobbied into support for this type of legislation which would be detrimental to free speech on the internet. Ron Paul has stood strong against this sort of legislation citing the Constitution as the one place to look that should guarantee this type of control never be given to the federal government.