discord with roughly 30 million daily users getting 1.4 billion views on their video is pretty funny
comments
‘‘youtube explained’’ channels in a few days: ‘‘THIS was THE FASTEST video to get 1 BILLION VIEWS!!!!!!1!!!’’
did you consider that maybe every single person in china might have bypassed the bans in order to watch it though
so cool for 20% of the world population to tune in to the announcement of discord lootboxes 
my theory is that discord is specifically exempt because of their “watch together” feature where they partnered with youtube to have a special feautre where people can watch video synced together on VC. perhaps as part of that, views in those embeds actually get counted.
there’s a lot of people saying that the video was view botted, but if you hovered over the card at the bottom a video would pop up that would play on loop,
so your theory makes sense in this context i suppose