>>56229076They could have.
It could also be scummy fans and antis in general that do it.
Malicious botting and for-profit botting is rampant on that shithole because of how bad Youtube is at actually detecting shit.
Quite frankly views shouldn't even count for people without accounts, or they should be counted totally separate and only logged-in views should count towards targets and other such sponsors.
And even then, a step further with registered viewers that have been verified as human to a reasonable degree.
That would combat a huge amount of it, but not all of it (as all it would take is someone making thousands of smartphones log in, register them all, verify as human, done)
Even if you went a step further and only counted people if they commented regularly, and showed human interaction on the website, that too can be botted using extremely basic AI. I've done it myself for games and even Drawball to get around botting filters.
A bunch of rooted smartphones with programs that fake browse and other interactions with Google services could easily be done.
It's an increasingly hard battle, but Youtube doesn't even TRY, as shown by The Spiffing Brit recently where he got like 18k people to duplicate tabs up to 30k and all of them got ads playing on those duplicated tabs. The whole damn site is functionally broken.
