I will not lie, I am a BTS fan so my arguments will be biased.

BTS is a South Korean boy band who has a achieved immense popularity around the world due to their hard work, dedicated fans and their music which contains a beautiful message of self-love and overcoming negativity among other things.

Now that you know who they are, here's the issue at hand. YouTube has been continuously deleting millions of views off of their music videos. BTS' fans (including myself) are aware that YouTube's system deletes a certain amount of views, thinking they are bots to keep the view count authentic during the first 24 hours post-release. This is great, but their system takes it too far that it is no longer for authenticity, but to shame the artist.

Here are some numbers:

7 305 736M views deleted from the Fake Love music video in 2018.

30M views were frozen from the Idol music video, but never added back in 2018.

10M views deleted from the Boy with Luv music video in 2019.

98M views deleted from the ON music video in 2020.

35M views deleted from the Stay Gold music video in 2020.

24M views deleted from the Dynamite music video in 2020

There are more examples, but you get the point.

BTS' fans put effort into supporting BTS by streaming as much as they can and those same fans, called ARMY, are millions of people around the globe to say the least. This explains why there are so many views in the first 24 hours causing YouTube's system to possibly glitch. Many ARMYs can only support the band by streaming and so when these views are deleted, our efforts feel useless and it causes heartache, because ARMYs want BTS to know they are supporting them. 

*This only happens to BTS. Not a single other artist constantly loses nearly as much views. ARMYs have complained, but YouTube refuses to put the numbers back. This shows this isn't a system glitch, but a direct attack on BTS. Considering how this isn’t the first shady thing the Western industry has done to them, it shows even more how this is NOT a simple computer error. Lack of radio play, robbed of deserving nominations are examples of attacks by this industry. Since BTS refuse to sign with an American label to not compromise their artistic integrity, the Western industry cannot even profit off of them and use them for their “good people” image, enraging them even more where they end up doing what I mentioned previously.

And so, with this petition I ask YouTube to put the correct view count back and apologize for doing both the artist and fans dirty.

P.S. The numbers provided came from Youtube's Live View Count and please keep in mind that I may have made a mistake during my research:))