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YouTube Rewind 2018 becomes website's second most disliked video of all time after Justin Bieber

YouTube's clip looking back on 2018 has been disliked 7.3 million times

Clémence Michallon
New York
Monday 10 December 2018 21:15 GMT
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YouTube Rewind 2018 shows Will Smith imagine YouTubers in Fortnite bus

The second most disliked video on YouTube is now one of its own.

YouTube Rewind 2018, an eight-minute clip looking back at the past 12 months, has received 7.3m dislikes since the platform released it on 6 December.

It's not far behind the music video for Justin Bieber's Baby, which has been the most disliked clip on the website for several years and currently has 9.7m thumbs down.

With its Rewind 2018 video, YouTube acknowledges several of the popular forms of content on its platform, such as K-Pop, melting lipsticks, mukbangs (videos in which a vlogger eats in front of the camera) and social media dance challenges.

The clip features a star-studded cast, beginning with Will Smith (who has a YouTube channel) and Olympian Adam Rippon, and including YouTube powerhouses Casey Neistat, James Charles, and Rosanna Pansino.

Trevor Noah, John Oliver, and Trixie Mattel also appear in the video, as well as vloggers from around the globe, such as France's EnjoyPhoenix.

In a somewhat self-congratulatory segment, some of the YouTubers credit the platform with helping advance various causes such as mental health awareness, Asian representation in entertainment, and female empowerment.

The video, however, doesn't mention several of the high-profile scandals faced by the website over the past year, such as Logan Paul's vlog in the Japanese Aokigahara forest, known to be a location where many suicides take place.

Paul's ad revenue was briefly suspended by YouTube following the controversy, and he is now back to vlogging.

Also omitted from the video is the amateur boxing match that took place in August 2018 between Paul and KSI, another YouTuber, at the Manchester Arena.

The clip doesn't make mention of PewDiePie, the biggest YouTuber on the platform with 75m subscribers, who has previously earned criticism for including racist and anti-Semitic messages in some of his videos.

It currently looks as though PewDiePie, who has been the top YouTuber for several years, is likely to be overtaken by T Series, an Indian music label and production company, as the reigning channel on the website – another notable fact in YouTube history that the clip fails to address.

Viewers expressed their dismay on Twitter after watching the clip, including one person who deemed the video to be "an example of YouTube’s fall into corporation over community".

"I’m disappointed that content creators have succumbed to sacrificing their personalities and quality content for monetary gain," that person added.

YouTuber Marques Brownlee, who appears in the Rewind clip, called it a "cringey, chaotic, super PC video".

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"Creators want YouTube Rewind to be a celebration of YouTubers and the biggest/best stuff on the platform that year," he tweeted.

"YouTube wants Rewind to be a couple minutes they can show to advertisers and say 'look at all the great stuff over here that you want to spend your dollars on!'"

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