A post claiming that PMO India has turned off the comments section for the Mann Ki Baat video released on 30 August 2020 on YouTube after it drew more dislikes, is being widely shared on social media. Through this article let’s fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: PMO India YouTube channel has turned off the comments section for the Mann Ki Baat video released on 30 August 2020 after it drew more dislikes.
Fact: The PMO India Youtube channel has disabled the comments section for all the videos. Even the oldest archived video of this channel which was archived on 12 May 2017, has the comment section disabled. Also, according to a YouTube policy update, if any channel or video’s audience is set as ‘made for kids’ the comment section will be automatically disabled. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
If we scroll down the channel, we can see the comment section is disabled for all the videos on this channel. The PMO India channel has disabled the comment section for all the videos on this channel and not for this specific video.
When we searched for the archived videos from this channel on the Wayback machine, we found a video from this channel which is archived on 12 May 2020, 14 July 2017 and 10 April 2019. Even in these archived versions, we can see that the comments section is disabled. With this, we can conclude that the disabling of comments section is not a recent development.
According to YouTube guidelines, comments may be turned off on a video in four possible cases which are listed below.
YouTube has released a policy update in January 2020 and according to this update, if any channel or video’s audience is set as ‘made for kids’ the comment section will be automatically disabled. In order to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) which prohibits data collection associated with children under the age of 13 without the parent’s consent. Hence, we can say at the comment section has been disabled because of one of the above reasons but not after the particular Mann ki Baat video dated 30 August 2020 drew more dislikes.
In the light of the central government’s decision to conduct the NEET 2020 examination amid the corona pandemic, the government faced flak from many students as is evident from the dislikes. It is in this background that posts such as the one mentioned in this article are being widely shared across social media platforms.
To sum it up, the PMO India Youtube channel has diasbled the comments for all the videos.
