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Meet the YouTubers Influencing — and Infiltrating — Politics
Social media isn’t just giving a voice to politicians. It’s creating entirely new ones.
It was the end of August 2017 when Elijah Daniel arrived in Hell, Michigan to be sworn in as mayor. The 23-year-old didn’t look the type to hold public office. He had a boyish haircut, tattoos on both arms, and was wearing a black Justin Bieber hoodie. And he wasn’t exactly elected. Instead, he’d come to this tiny town in central Michigan after hearing about a local tourist attraction that lets anyone pay $100 to become mayor for one day.
Daniel found the whole experience hilarious. He filmed his day in Hell for the YouTube channel he ran with his vlogging partner, Christine Sydelko. The tightly edited video was watched more than 800,000 times. For the international news outlets that covered the episode, it was a fun, clickbait story. But the YouTuber turned rapper and gay rights activist — who has since bought Hell and rebranded the town “Gay Hell” — was also making a serious point about politics. “If Donald Trump, a reality star, can be our president, there’s no reason why I can’t be a politician,” he tweeted.
Daniel’s stunt proved to be a precursor to a new global political trend. One year after Daniel became mayor of Hell, a Brazilian YouTuber was elected as a state representative, and this year has already seen YouTubers campaign for seats in Congress and the European Parliament.
Celebrities have long tried to reinvent themselves as politicians, from Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Donald Trump. And activists and politicians have experimented with YouTube for years, welcoming the global exposure the platform can bring. But now, YouTubers who have built their brands on entertainment are running for office themselves. Across the world, some of the platform’s creators are incorporating national politics into their usual offering of irreverent vlogs, pranks, or music covers — and threatening to leverage their huge followings for political support.
YouTubers argue they can offer the public something missing from conventional politics: intimacy, and the ability to communicate with their audience as if they were friends. Speaking from New York’s Staten Island, Joseph…
