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YouTubers Will Enter Politics, And If They Do, They're Probably Going To Win (buzzfeednews.com)
A group of twentysomethings leveraged their huge YouTube audiences and actually won seats in Brazil's federal and state elections. What happens next is anyone's guess. Ryan Broderick, writing for BuzzFeed News: Kim Kataguiri is known in Brazil for a lot of things. He's been called a fascist. He's been called a fake news kingpin. Is he a YouTuber? He definitely uses YouTube. He's definitely a troll. A troll with a consistent message, though, he points out. Maybe he's Brazil's equivalent of Milo Yiannopoulos. His organization, Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL) -- the Free Brazil Movement -- is like the Brazilian Breitbart. Or maybe it's like the American tea party. Maybe it's both. Is it a news network? Kataguiri says it isn't. But it's not a political party, either. He says MBL is just a bunch of young people who love free market economics and memes. One thing is very clear: His YouTube channel, the memes, the fake news, and MBL's army of supporters have helped Kataguiri, 22, become the youngest person ever elected to Congress in Brazil. He's also trying to become Brazil's equivalent of speaker of the House.
[...] Kataguiri's political awakening is a textbook example of the way algorithms beget more algorithms. During his last year of high school, his teacher started a debate about welfare programs in Brazil. So Kataguiri started googling. He discovered Ron Paul and the Brazilian libertarian YouTuber Daniel Fraga. "Then I did a video to my teacher and my friends at school to talk about what I had found out," Kataguiri says. "There was one problem: I posted this video on YouTube. So it was public and it went viral." He says people kept asking for more videos, but he didn't know anything. So he went back to googling, and then made more videos about what he learned.
[...] Kataguiri's political awakening is a textbook example of the way algorithms beget more algorithms. During his last year of high school, his teacher started a debate about welfare programs in Brazil. So Kataguiri started googling. He discovered Ron Paul and the Brazilian libertarian YouTuber Daniel Fraga. "Then I did a video to my teacher and my friends at school to talk about what I had found out," Kataguiri says. "There was one problem: I posted this video on YouTube. So it was public and it went viral." He says people kept asking for more videos, but he didn't know anything. So he went back to googling, and then made more videos about what he learned.
The problem is that for every sane Youtuber with a halfway decent following, you have an army of idiots that BLOW YOUR MIND, can count to 10 and show you a million things to do to your hair (with a link to buy the crap in the description, either as a promo-link to Amazon and the like or they run their own crap already and bypass the middleman when it comes to swindling teenies out of money).
Not to mention the criminally insane, from apricot-core eaters to flat earthers to the politically-religious, ranging all the way from the kill-the-fags right wing nutjob to the kill-the-cis-males left wing nutjobs.
My only hope is that they are SO many and fracturing their user base SO widely (because they themselves can't get along) that they splinter it up into so many insignificant groups that they in total don't matter.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
dont give millennials that much credit. Just listen to the stupid shit that Cortez person keeps uttering without exhibiting even the least bit of comprehension of basic math and accounting. Everything is about taxing the rich to pay for everything instead of trying to make things cost less so they dont bankrupt the country. Take her healthcare approach. Everyone wants to give other countries as examples of universal healthcare. You know what those countries DONT have? Doctors making 7 figure salaries and billions upon billions siphoned off in malpractice suits. I have no doubt Kalifornia will elect the next person purely because they say stupid shit on youtube without the first thought on how to actually make it work. A Goal, without a Plan, is called a Wish.
I'd say Milo and maybe Ann Coulter are trolls, but the label doesn't extend to people who are merely kooky or extremists.