List of most-disliked YouTube videos

This list of most-disliked YouTube videos contains the top 42 videos with the most dislikes as of December 12, 2021, 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 like and dislike buttons on video pages as part of a major site redesign in 2010. 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 below. For instance, "Despacito", "Baby Shark Dance" and "Gangnam Style" appear on this list, but also on the most-liked YouTube videos list. As of December 2021^[update], Cocomelon 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 had previously entered the Guinness World Records book as the most disliked video on YouTube and on the Internet.^[5] YouTube Rewind 2018 had over 7.1 million more dislikes than Justin Bieber's Baby on July 9, 2021.

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]

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 children's music video, with over 14.39 million dislikes as of October 2021.^[10] 2016 showed the most-disliked videogame trailer, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, which stands at over three million dislikes.^[11][12] It became YouTube's second-most disliked video within two weeks of being released.^[13] In 2016, PewDiePie achieved a video in the top 3 by explicitly asking his own viewers to dislike his video.^[14]

Uploaded on the 12th of August, 2020, the trailer for Sadak 2 became the most disliked movie trailer on YouTube within the first two days after its release: on the 13th, it had already obtained 5.3 million dislikes.^[15] On the 18th, 6 days after its release, 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 COPPA-compliant changes it made to its policy on January 6, 2020.

On November 10, 2021, YouTube made video dislike counts private to the creator, purportedly to "reduce harassment associated with targeted dislike attacks".^[16] The update was widely criticized by the YouTube community, including by many YouTubers and by co-founder and first uploader, Jawed Karim.^[17][18][19] One common point of criticism was that publicly visible dislikes enabled users to immediately spot and avoid videos that are fraudulent, unhelpful, dangerous, explicit, discriminatory, or generally low-quality, and now they can no longer count on that. However, there are some browser extensions (such as "Return YouTube Dislike" and "ImprovedTube") which allow the user to view estimated dislikes on videos. In the month following the change, on December 13, YouTube removed the actual dislike data from its API,^{[20][21][22][23]} making it fully inaccessible at last – both to users and to developers.