It's not a conspiracy. The counter number always stalls for the first day or so, then catches up.
I have no idea why, but it's a tech issue, not a political plot.
not really a tech issue so much as a deterrent. For likes and dislikes they are limited to one per registered user. Hard to spam unless you make a multitude of accounts just to like or dislike.. and the account creation is protected by a CAPTCHA key to make it hard to automate. Views can be as simple as any annon user refreshing a page over and over. So for new/hot videos you dont want to show view count going up every time you spam a reload because youtube doesnt want to show how they determine when to stop giving a spamming IP credit for view counts. They basically don’t want to give away the methods they use for determining spamming IP’s.