YouTube is 10 years old. Here’s how it has changed politics forever.

Coverage Type: 

On this day 10 years ago, the first-ever video was uploaded to YouTube. It involved a zoo. And elephants. But it wasn't until more than a year later that YouTube got real for politicians.

On Aug. 15, 2006, the "macaca" video was uploaded to YouTube. George Allen's (still) nonsensical description of an Indian American kid who was tracking the Virginia Republican senator's campaign became a seminal moment not only in that campaign (Allen lost, dashing his hopes of running for president in 2008) but also in politics more broadly. Here's why. Trackers -- people who follow around the opposing party's candidate(s) -- are nothing new, and weren't even all that new back in 2006. What "macaca" revealed was the power of YouTube's capacity to easily upload and disseminate video. No longer would a tracker have to peddle a videocassette of allegedly damaging footage to a local TV station in hopes of getting them to a) look at it and b) run it in some form. YouTube made every tracker his or her own TV station with a potentially limitless audience. And seeing a politician doing or saying something stupid was infinitely more powerful than reading about the stupid thing they said or did. We are a visual culture; we like to SEE things to truly understand them (or to be truly offended or impressed by them.) YouTube made that possible for every American with an Internet connection. Suddenly, every public moment of a politician's life became fair game. Allen became a cautionary tale for candidates. Avoiding a "YouTube moment" became part of the political vernacular. And politicians became a lot more guarded. Those trends have only been accelerated by the advent of smartphones that shoot video, and other applications -- Vine, Periscope etc. -- that allow that video to be spliced into bite-sized portions or live-streamed. That YouTube and its many progeny have fundamentally altered politics is beyond debate. Whether those changes are a net positive or negative for the average person's ability to understand how their government thinks and works is more up in the air. Some argue politicians talking directly to people without the media filter is the best-case scenario for democracy. I'd argue that differently, of course. To me, having representatives of the people (us in the media) asking questions of our politicians and following up on those questions is genuinely valuable -- and provides more insight into how our elected officials think than a video written, produced and filmed by the politician's staff.


YouTube is 10 years old. Here’s how it has changed politics forever.