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.

Comments

Wrong question asked

[sinij]

The question should be is this is the end of leftism and identity politics no longer hold absolute power? I hope so.

We go out of our way

[rsilvergun]

to prevent informed people from voting. This is why older folks are such a valuable demographic.

I've told this story before. Where I am the local power company wanted to end the practice of paying solar power users for their extra power. Only thing is, that was very, very popular. Their law didn't have a chance of passing.

Well pass it did. How you ask? They ran these ads see. There were a bunch of older folks sitting around a table talking about something. Something scary. At no time during the advert did anyone say what it was. At the end was an impassioned plea to vote yes and proposition such-and-such. It passed with room to spare, and the power companies no longer had to pay for the free solar.

Those are your "informed" voter. Meanwhile you need only spend a bit of time on google to see how bad voter suppression is in this country.

It's harder for the left because we _don't_ have propaganda. We've got no Rush Limbaugh. No Fox News. No CNN pretending to be middle of the road and then pushing trickle down economics on the sly. We've got no Sinclair media buying out all the stations.

Again, I don't think I can reach you. You've got the talking points from your right wing think tanks too down pat. You were ready to go with a rebuttal because they've given you all the answers. It's tough for me to compete with a multi-billion dollar right wing propaganda machine. And again, maybe I'll get to a few you're trying to mislead. Maybe even some day you'll follow that google search above and figure out Rush is lying to you. Or maybe the American empire will just carry on it's slow, Romanesque decline...

One things for sure: I definitely pushed your buttons. Somewhere in the back of your mind you know something wrong with that propaganda you've been spoon fed. I guess I'll chalk that up as a win.