  This paper contributes to the ongoing discussions on the scholarly access to
social media data, discussing a case where this access is barred despite its
value for understanding and countering online disinformation and despite the
absence of privacy or copyright issues. Our study concerns YouTube's engagement
metrics and, more specifically, the way in which the platform removes "fake
views" (i.e., views considered as artificial or illegitimate by the platform).
Working with one and a half year of data extracted from a thousand French
YouTube channels, we show the massive extent of this phenomenon, which concerns
the large majority of the channels and more than half the videos in our corpus.
Our analysis indicates that most fakes news are corrected relatively late in
the life of the videos and that the final view counts of the videos are not
independent from the fake views they received. We discuss the potential harm
that delays in corrections could produce in content diffusion: by inflating
views counts, illegitimate views could make a video appear more popular than it
is and unwarrantedly encourage its human and algorithmic recommendation.
Unfortunately, we cannot offer a definitive assessment of this phenomenon,
because YouTube provides no information on fake views in its API or interface.
This paper is, therefore, also a call for greater transparency by YouTube and
other online platforms about information that can have crucial implications for
the quality of online public debate.
