List of most-disliked YouTube videos

This list of most-disliked YouTube videos contains the top 42 videos with the most dislikes of all time, as derived from the American video platform, YouTube's, charts.^[2] The dislike count was taken directly from the page of the video itself. YouTube implemented a like and dislike button on video pages from 2010 as part of a major site redesign. The feature served as a replacement for the previous five-star rating system,^[3] which was found to be ineffective because of the rare selection of ratings from two to four stars.^[4] Of the 42 videos in this list, 6 also appear in the list of most-viewed YouTube videos and 4 appear in the list of most-liked YouTube videos. Note that the dislike count does not indicate the true unpopularity of a video, which is better represented by dislike percentage, also provided in the table. For instance "Despacito", "Baby Shark Dance", and "Gangnam Style" all appear on this list, but also appear in the list of most-liked YouTube videos. As of December 2021^[update], Cocomelon – Nursery Rhymes has the most videos in the top 50 with thirteen, while YouTube and Jingle Toons have two.

On December 13, 2018, YouTube Rewind 2018: Everyone Controls Rewind became the most disliked video on the video sharing platform with 15 million dislikes, rapidly surpassing the music video for Justin Bieber's song "Baby",^[1] which previously entered the Guinness World Records book as the most disliked video on YouTube and on the Internet.^[5] As of July 9, 2021, YouTube Rewind 2018 has over 7.1 million more dislikes than Justin Bieber's Baby.

In March 2011, "Baby", which then had 1.17 million dislikes, was surpassed by the video for Rebecca Black's "Friday", yielding more than 1.2 million dislikes.^[6] "Friday" amassed over three million dislikes before the video was taken down in June 2011. The video was reinstated three months later and has not been taken down since.^[7]

Measurement of dislikes on YouTube has been of academic and political interest. Following its immediate negative reception, Rick Perry's 2012 presidential campaign advertisement "Strong" garnered over 600,000 dislikes within five days.^[8] This phenomenon was seen by Mike Barthel of The Village Voice as a reason not to judge entertainment and politics by the same standard of online publicity; he opined that the only time people are going to care more about politics than entertainment is when there is a clear and immediate threat to their well-being.^[9] Recently, many videos from news channels and corporations have been dislike bombed when they talk about topics like the 2020 election or the COVID-19 pandemic.^{[citation needed]}

Music videos, including children's music videos, made up a majority of the most disliked uploads to YouTube. "Baby Shark Dance" is the most disliked "made for kids" video,^{[failed verification]} with over 13.3 million dislikes. 2016 showed the most disliked video game trailer, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, which stands at over three million dislikes.^[10][11] It became YouTube's second-most-disliked video within two weeks of being released.^[12] In 2016, PewDiePie achieved a video in the top 3 by explicitly asking his own viewers to dislike his video.^[13]

In August 2020, the Indian film Sadak 2's trailer became the most disliked movie trailer on YouTube. In the first two days after its release, the trailer received 5.3 million dislikes and currently has over 12 million dislikes.^[14] On August 18, at about 18:00 UTC, it surpassed Justin Bieber's "Baby" to become the second most-disliked video with 13.24 million dislikes. As of October 2021, more than half of the top 50 most-disliked videos are music videos for children, with 31 of these 50 videos (62%) being set as "made for kids" according to YouTube's changes in policy on January 6, 2020, to comply with COPPA.

On November 10, 2021, YouTube made dislike counts on videos private, purportedly to "reduce harassment associated with targeted dislike attacks."^[15] The announcement and update was widely criticized by members of the YouTube community, including from creators and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim,^{[16][17][18][19]} due to visible dislikes allowing users to immediately spot videos that are fraudulent, unhelpful, dangerous, explicit, discriminatory or generally poor-quality. However, there are some browser extensions which allow the user to view estimations of current dislikes on videos.^{[20][21][22][23]}