When I was checking my celeb gossip this morning on thedirty.com, I found a post about Obama. There is a video from Youtube, posted back in March, in which a man claims that back in 1999 he and Obama shared a limo and drank together, Obama provided the two with cocaine and crack and then the man gave Obama oral sex. He said their interaction lasted a few more days, as they met in hotel rooms in Illinois. He finishes his video by challenging Obama to come out and tell the truth about what happened.
After I googled this incident to see if it was anywhere else, I could not find much about it. This video proves that Youtube gives people a lot more power than they should have. In this age of technology and, unfortunately, laziness, people who come across this video may take it as truth and not do any background research on it. What I want to know is whether Youtube will end up having a positive or negative effect on a candidate's success.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVeFVtcdSYY
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2 comments:
this is similar to the way that the enquirer is only quoted in actual press once or twice a year. it has less to do with the "power" of youtube and more to do with the fact that a bad lie is still a bad lie.
let's go ahead and coin it: "yellow youtubeism"
I agree that YouTube is very powerful and can impact the course of this election, for sure. I think videos that take off in terms of their online popularity may create a new means of spreading attack messages that independent groups are throwing out there. They can simply, and cheaply, create videos for online distribution with shady logic and troublesome facts about their opposition, and if they are sensational and entertaining enough, they'll definitely get passed around and achieve their objective. Therefore, the public must be very careful as this election goes forward in this new period of YouTube, as no political message aired online can be taken for its word.
That's why the candidate's image and voice are so important to TV ads these days, because it forces the campaigns to give their advertisements some credibility and show that the candidate is standing behind the message they are sending out. With the ads that independent groups create, there is much more freedom, and therefore danger, in terms of what can be said, how true it has to be, and who will be held ultimately responsible, if anyone, for the claims made.
The internet obviously takes that danger to a completely different level, as YouTube user names are meaningless to the larger public. They could be affiliated with a candidate, a party, or just have a particular bias. YouTube makes the common man's perspective be heard, which is scary in itself when it comes to political influence, but it also places this common man's perspective right next to the perspective of someone loosely connected to a campaign, and the public may have no idea which is which. I think YouTube will ultimately have a positive effect on the campaign for the channels the site provides to each candidate, as Americans can go back and listen to old speeches and rallies to learn more about the candidates, but this negative possibility is definitely something to watch out for.
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