Campaigning comes to YouTube

Keiron Nicholson looks at how campaigners across the world are using the video-sharing phenomenon to get their message across.

''It's one of the great Internet success stories, and eighteen months after they invented it, its founders are billionaires.'' ''How do we know that the supposedly personal insights of strangers are free from propaganda?''

YouTube is a pretty simple idea: it's a place to upload and watch videos, by anyone, of anything. And people do, around 70 million times every day. It's one of the great Internet success stories, and eighteen months after they invented it, its founders are billionaires.

People often upload clips from TV, but it's home movies that have made YouTube a hit. Ordinary-looking people talk about their lives to a cheap DV camera, and then deliver the results, piping hot, to your desktop computer. It provides direct access to the hearts and minds of a million people you'll probably never meet - frivolous, funny and sometimes even moving.

This is the brilliance of the Internet - a tool we too often take for granted. Nobody in history has ever been able to do anything like this. YouTube allows personal interaction with anyone in the world, without big budgets, censorship of opinion or compromise of message. It's an incredible new way to communicate, and it's exactly what today's campaigners need to explore.

For instance, people are always saying that the world is getting hotter. A lot of people say it - Oxfam say it a lot (It is, after all, true.)

They say it on YouTube as well. For example, check out this UK government climate change ad, a video of a climate change march, or these students in the US doing their bit and talking about it.

But how do we know that the supposedly personal insights of strangers are free from propaganda? Take the video, Al Gore's Penguin Army , in which Al Gore bores an army of penguins with an interminable lecture on climate change. The irreverent attitude, the crappy animation, and the pop culture touchstones are quintessential YouTube. It's also a fake - funded, it would seem, by oil giant ExxonMobil.

Clever, but people don't like being lied to. While it's now one of YouTube's most watched videos, popular opinion has reduced its rating to 0 stars, and you'd be hard-pressed to miss the criticism on the comments page. (For what it's worth, check out A Terrifying Message From Al Gore proof that at least he doesn't take himself too seriously.)

The beauty of YouTube is that the massive budget of a big business, cleverly deployed as it may be, will ultimately get you nowhere in the site's unmediated wilderness. Its acquisition by Google is a concern to some, but if the site does become loaded with corporate advertising, the masses will probably just vacate it for something new.

Technology like this has the capacity to engage with people, in a way that modern political showmanship entirely fails to do. If you need convincing, watch this video. It's a personal account of the real effects of charity work, with zero flash and dazzle, and I can't think of a better advert for what we're trying to achieve.