A constantly growing phenomenon has affected all elections since Barack Obama’s first term began in his successful 2008 campaign: YouTube, the largest video sharing platform.
Every day, there is more content uploaded to YouTube alone than the average human could ever watch in their lifetime. For context, that’s around 720,000 hours of video added to the platform every day — about 80 years’ worth of content. That’s not factoring in streaming platforms, livestreams and so much more produced and available for consumption every day.
Amidst the exponentially growing media pool that is slowly drowning all of us in reductive content, votes in the 2024 United States elections are about to be counted. As important as this election is, how can anyone — especially voters — learn about the current state of U.S. politics through media when doing so successfully is like finding a needle in a haystack?
Well, a curated list is a start, and last week, the Life Section published a piece laying out an assortment of great podcasts for voters to use to dive into unbiased, or at least in-depth dialogues. Kamala Harris appeared on “Call Her Daddy” and Donald Trump appeared on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” both rapidly accruing millions of views. It was in reading this, and seeing those podcasts, that I realized the immense impact that YouTube is having on the campaign trails for both candidates.
In the first few hours of uploading on Oct. 25, Trump’s interview surpassed 30 million views. It now has 45 million.
One of the top comments by @catoftruth1044 reads: “Podcasts are officially more important than traditional media now.” That comment alone has 331,000 likes.
Harris’ interview on “Call Her Daddy” has over 700,000 views on YouTube, and many more on Spotify, the podcast’s main platform.
There is something surreal when you add up these viewership statistics and factor in the wide variety of content that both candidates have been in. Internet personality Logan Paul interviewed Trump on his “Impaulsive” podcast, and then unsurprisingly, a few days before the election, Paul endorsed Trump’s ticket. That video currently has 6.7 million views. We are amidst an unprecedented cycle of content creation that far exceeds the typical coverage seen in previous decades.
Harris has been on something of a “Media Blitz” the past few weeks leading up to the election, including a Fox interview (on YouTube), an iHeartRadio appearance as well as the “Call Her Daddy” interview.
It’s a serious effort, and other interviews such as her discussion on the Howard Stern Show have accumulated millions of views.
In the end — or rather what is just the beginning of YouTube’s impact — over a quarter of Americans use YouTube as a news source, a critical chunk of voters that could easily sway election results.
So, the candidates themselves have clearly seen the potential in the platform, or at least their campaign teams have. There is often something strange about seeing both candidates’ dialogue captured so plainly, without any script or security around them (though there is probably some secret security just out of frame). You see Trump in fairly plain lighting, removed from a cheering audience. In the Harris interviews, you see professionalism that is often lost when looking at her rallies from the perspective of a distant onlooker.
There is something exciting about the potential for YouTube to raise a new generation of interviewers, though I admit that Paul’s “Impaulsive” sets a pretty low bar. Rather than working your way up through a centralized media corporation, you can find an audience on a platform like YouTube, and if you retain a large enough audience, politicians may realize that you are, in a sense, a mini-swing state. When millions of Americans rally behind a content creator, a politician can’t ignore that block. A successful interview can sway the minds of millions overnight and hopefully with future generations of — hopefully younger — political candidates, interviews will be more frequent, less structured and more intimate than ever.
I want to conclude on this note: For Americans frustrated by the two-party system, the lack of dynamic candidates, and the inaccessibility of U.S. politics, YouTube, or content sharing, may be a bottom-up solution that can reinvent the ways in which we interact with representatives. The future may look grim, but with politicians at our fingertips, maybe there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
This post was originally published on here
