202
votes
Accepted
Does YouTube delete video dislikes?
Yes, they do. They will also delete likes.
However, the comments quoted and the general complaints on that video about dislikes going away are based on the claim that Gillette is either paying ...
- 9,459
166
votes
Does YouTube delete video dislikes?
YouTube itself says that it can remove dislikes. From Likes and Dislikes report:
You may see like/dislike counts change as some may be marked invalid and periodically removed from the counts. Learn ...
- 38.8k
107
votes
Accepted
Does WordPress power 27% of the Internet?
This number comes from W3Techs - World Wide Web Technology Surveys.
According to that survey, as of December 2016,
WordPress is used by 27.2% of all the websites
that they monitor. (Source.)
However,...
- 10.2k
89
votes
Accepted
Does Sci-Hub use malware and phishing to obtain researchers' login credentials?
The claim in the article that people who go to the Sci-Hub website are "very vulnerable to having their credentials stolen" is completely baseless, since Sci-Hub never asks for credentials ...
- 42.7k
58
votes
Is the internet in Madagascar faster than in UK?
That might be true in 2017, or at the beginning of the 2018 when UK analytics firm Cable published its speed table. Right now you can check the stats live.
And although Madagascar is still "faster" ...
- 2,785
58
votes
Accepted
Is this 'United Nations New World Order' website affiliated with the United Nations?
According to a press briefing published on the official un.org, the website is not associated with the UN:
**Unaffiliated Website
And just to note that over the weekend, I’ve been receiving a lot of ...
tim♦
- 51.2k
55
votes
Is there any evidence of a secret level of deeply-hidden web-pages called "Marianas Web"?
No, it's an Internet urban legend
"Marianas web" is an expression originating from an infographic first published on Imgur in 2011 that attempted to provide a classification of the deep web ...
- 746
49
votes
Is this 'United Nations New World Order' website affiliated with the United Nations?
(This answers addresses the original question, which was more focused on whether the site was legitimate or was just made to be fodder for conspiracy theories. The current version focuses on whether ...
- 11.4k
47
votes
Accepted
Was Andrew Tate raided by police because of a pizza box revealing that he is in Romania?
(edit: Oddthinking found an explicit denial that the pizza box had anything to do with it, so I accordingly have edited this answer.)
Report says "police monitored social media"
I believe ...
- 42.7k
32
votes
Accepted
Were the Starlink units for Ukraine not paid by Musk?
At least some Starlink units have been paid by SpaceX.
It is not possible to establish whether any of those were "paid by Musk himself", no sources cite anything like that.
It seems that of ...
- 2,329
31
votes
Is the internet in Madagascar faster than in UK?
As of July 2019 according to the Speedtest.net Global Index , Madagascar (unranked mobile, rank 68 fixed) ranks below all of the 3 listed countries: United Kingdom (rank 50 mobile, rank 41 fixed), ...
- 18.7k
30
votes
Accepted
Did Al Gore invent the internet?
The facts of this situation are pretty well known. During his time in Congress, Gore played a vital role in the creation of the computer networking system that we know as 'the internet..
Internet ...
- 56.8k
27
votes
Does YouTube delete video dislikes?
Yes, YouTube moderators can delete Likes and Dislikes.
Cinema of Change tracked the responses to the Gillette video over a short period.
With the help of YouTube’s API and Archive.fo’s screenshots of ...
- 371
26
votes
Accepted
Did Stack Overflow cut the number of negative comments nearly in half between the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2019 and January 21, 2020?
I think it's a little ambiguous if this is on topic for Skeptics, since it relies on knowledge only Stack Overflow employees have.
So I posted a long answer on Meta Stack Overflow (we're only ...
- 384
26
votes
Was Andrew Tate raided by police because of a pizza box revealing that he is in Romania?
@Avery's existing answer shows how the story was generated.
As a complement, we now have denials from Romanian authorities that they used the pizza boxes.
Philadephia Inquirer:
Ramona Bolla, a ...
- 139k
25
votes
Accepted
Is Kaspersky Lab a military unit?
While there's no proof, this seems like an incorrect assertion.
Based on the wording, this most likely seems like either a typo (or simply a rather grammatically-challenged typist); or simply two ...
- 31.1k
23
votes
Accepted
Did a Chinese farmer spend 16 years learning law so he could sue a chemical company?
tl;dr- This appears to be based on a true story, however the overall narrative seems pretty misleading. In particular:
The farmer wasn't a one-man crusade.
The farmer didn't spend 16 years ...
- 4,051
18
votes
Does YouTube delete video dislikes?
It's been previously documented that "glitches" can also alter the like/dislike ratio on a large scale, for example, a Justin Bieber video (including, bizarrely, adding dislikes to likes), so it's ...
- 1,172
12
votes
Does Sci-Hub use malware and phishing to obtain researchers' login credentials?
Does Sci-Hub rely on stolen credentials from unwitting researchers? Yes, at least in part. This is confirmed by Alexandra Elbakyan herself, although she also claims that Sci-Hub isn't the one ...
- 1,011
11
votes
Accepted
Does Google hire "human filters"?
Yes, they do hire people to filter content.
I wasn't aware that this information could be considered controversial. It's not really a secret, it's called Commercial Content Moderation and most big ...
- 698
11
votes
Accepted
Are seven keys able to turn off the internet?
Taking down DNS is not the same as taking down "the internet". As the quote says, DNS is like a phone book for the internet; if you want to call Joe Smith, then you look up "Joe Smith&...
- 516
10
votes
Accepted
Do the owners of the typefaces Garamond, Times New Roman and Georgia charge businesses who use them?
I selected Times New Roman as an example for this answer.
The Wikipedia page on Times New Roman does a better job than I could of explaining the history of the typeface, including that, yes, its ...
- 139k
9
votes
Accepted
Does streaming a video to smartphone consume 1000W of electricity?
Summary:
The data (model + coefficients together with source citations) of the Lean ICT study are available (see below).
HD Video streaming consuming between 250 W and 1 kW power equivalent is ...
9
votes
Accepted
Does streaming an album 27 times consume as much energy as manufacturing a CD?
The original research that produced this was done in a collaboration between the University of Glasgow and the University of Oslo, and UoG details it here. While the Glasgow part is available here, ...
- 1,068
9
votes
Do more men use the Internet than women?
The percent of (adult) men and women who use the internet is about the same in America.
According to data from the Pew Research Center, since the year 2000, the biggest gap was 66% men used the ...
- 27.7k
9
votes
Accepted
Is Arabic the 4th most common language used on internet?
With regards to this question,
How come arabs be so verbose in the field of chatting and be so unproductive in terms of internet content?
a possible answer comes from this sentence in the IWS site:...
- 302
9
votes
Is Arabic the 4th most common language used on internet?
Most likely true
There is little doubt that first 3 languages are English, Chinese and Spanish.
The contestants for number 4 spot would be:
Portugese
Russian
Hindi
Arabic
If you look at number ...
- 26.6k
8
votes
Accepted
Was #itAintRape every used seriously to justify rape?
The lifestyle website HelloGiggles describes how the hashtag started:
In 2010, Duval tweeted: “#itaintrape if u naked of Yo Twitter profile pic”, “#itaintrape if I’m paying child support”, “Lmao RT ...
tim♦
- 51.2k
8
votes
Is this 'United Nations New World Order' website affiliated with the United Nations?
The website has now been stripped of the UN logo and most of the content it had when this question was posted. Additionally, the copyright notice at the bottom has changed from "United Nations ...
- 4,086
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible