![]() YouTube has lifted the veil on politicians, effectively placing them under 24 hour scrutiny, with every slip at risk of being captured and endlessly replayed. I’m sorry.” The response? An autotuned remix, cycling the words “so, so, sorry”, earning 2.8 million views. It was shot in soft focus before a set of French windows. In September 2012, Nick Clegg uploaded an apology for breaking a vow on tuition fees to YouTube. “It just reassured the public of their worst suspicion: that he was a total loser,” says Harry Cole, the news editor of the politics blog, Guido Fawkes. In April 2009, when the expenses scandal lit a fire under Westminster, Gordon Brown, then Labour Prime Minister, posted a call for reform to YouTube, wearing a glazed grin throughout. Some reached the highest office in the world. Many politicians have attempted to ride the YouTube tiger. Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign included 30 staff working on YouTube Journalists have been replaced by YouTube”. The veteran Middle East reporter, Jeffrey Goldberg, recently wrote that extremists no longer bother meeting with journalists. ![]() ![]() Isil and KKK propaganda videos jostle for attention alongside English town council candidates and teenage pranksters. In the eight years since, YouTube has become a raucous town square for those who aspire to power, good and evil. The expenses scandal was brewing and Steve Hilton, his top adviser, realised the new website offered a chance to by-pass the television broadcasters and win over voters who’d never touched the Tories. Ten months earlier Cameron had won the Conservative leadership on a platform of reaching the voters others could not. It is October 2006 and WebCameron, a new YouTube channel, is born. ![]() We're a bit wobbly, but this is one of the ways we want to communicate with people properly,” says David Cameron. The 40-year old MP for Witney scrapes plates into a bin, while his wife helps their children get ready for school in their handsome kitchen. Almost anyone can upload almost anything to YouTube, for free, and be in with a chance of reaching its one billion monthly users – whether they’re activists, terrorists, politicians or pop stars (or just the proud owner of a “mutant giant spider dog”). What is beyond debate is YouTube’s influence (spotted by a far-sighted Google in 2006, when it bought the site for $1.65 billion). It’s been lauded for promoting democracy and reenergising education, while being disparaged for its endless cat videos and nasty user comments. This high-and-low ethos is baked into YouTube’s culture. According to Jawed Karim, he and two of his PayPal colleagues, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, launched the site after becoming frustrated that they couldn’t find footage of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and, er, Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at the Super Bowl the same year. The online video behemoth has become the world’s third most-visited website, after Google and Facebook. And Blockbuster… Well, kids, Blockbuster was a video rental shop offering films on DVD and VHS. Today, 300 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. In late 2005, when YouTube was just a few months old, one of its co-founders announced that the site’s users were consuming the equivalent of an entire Blockbuster store each month.
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