#DELETED; Big Tech's Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal the Election by Allum Bokhari

Author:Allum Bokhari [Bokhari, Allum]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2020-09-22T07:00:00+00:00

10. Censorship Kills the YouTube Star

In politics and culture, it is hard to overstate the importance of YouTube, the Google-owned tech giant that dominates online video. Millennials and Generation Z do not watch cable news—they watch their favorite YouTuber.

Watching a YouTube video is not like sharing a tweet or hitting “like” on a Facebook post. Even if you don’t watch a video to the end, you have to click on it, press play, and begin watching. The investment is far greater than retweeting a post that flicks across your newsfeed for an instant.

In contrast to many other social media giants, YouTube is a platform that thrives on long-form, in-depth content. Because of that, it plays a central role in developing the values and mind-set of younger generations. As a result, leftists and the media are more terrified of YouTube than they are of perhaps any other platform.

In addition, YouTube viewers’ demographics are terrifying to the mainstream media.

Consider this: in 2017, according to TV raters Nielsen, the median age of Fox News and MSNBC viewers was sixty-five, while CNN’s was only slightly younger at fifty-nine. The average cable news viewer, then, is an aging baby boomer at worst or an early Gen Xer at best.

Compared to YouTube, the difference is staggering. Felix Kjellberg (better known as “PewDiePie”), the Swedish independent content creator whose channel was the most popular on the platform from 2013 until 2019, revealed in 2018 that just 1 percent of his viewers were over fifty-five. The largest segment of his audience was the eighteen to twenty-four demographic, which made up 44 percent of his audience, and the second-largest was the twenty-five to thirty-four demographic, with 28 percent.1

Surveys of young people also support the picture of YouTube displacing the mainstream media. A survey commissioned by Variety in 2014 found that American teenagers rated YouTube personalities far higher than they rated traditional celebrities on a range of factors, including relatability, authenticity, and other factors that marketers have identified as sources of influence. Of the five celebrities who topped the survey, all—including comedy duo Smosh, the YouTuber KSI, and PewDiePie—were online stars. Leonardo DiCaprio, a Hollywood megastar of the 1990s and early 2000s, languished at twentieth.2 In other words, an online celebrity who tells his millions of young viewers that the “gender pay gap” is a myth (yes, PewDiePie did do that)3 has completely eclipsed a traditional movie star who lectures his dwindling fan base about the importance of ditching plastic straws from the luxury of his private jet.4

Purely political channels don’t, generally, rise to the same level of popularity as PewDiePie, who was born in 1989 and generally puts entertainment first and politics perhaps a distant third. Still, the YouTubers who focus on politics and current affairs shouldn’t be underestimated—in raw numbers, they are snapping at the heels of the mainstream broadcasters, and, like PewDiePie’s, their demographics are far better for advertisers.

YouTube, then, has both depth and breadth. A subscriber to a YouTube channel is, by virtue of the platform’s

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