How YouTube is reshaping indian politics
_____ • _____ Popularity of platform has spawned media micro-barons with huge local influence, and politicians need to co-opt them to sway voters
India’s 2014 general election was called a ‘Facebook’ election. In 2019, it was called a ‘WhatsApp’ election. The 2024 poll will be known as the ‘YouTube’ election. Since India got 4G connectivity in 2016, YouTube channels have become more influential than the mainstream media.
YouTube news reporters and presenters have become street celebrities. The revolution is not limited to politics. A friend in Bihar tells me that district and town-level cricket tournaments in his state are broadcast live by local YouTubers and are watched by around 16,000 people at a time. A news channel tends to cover top-level news. Local YouTube channels cover the news bottom up. By virtue of being small, fragmented and often heavily localised, they cover the local like nobody else can. And, all politics, they say, is local. The medium’s power and reach make it impossible for the enterprising not to have their platform on YouTube.
The economics matters: YouTube and Facebook give you some share of their ad revenues. It’s often a pittance, but with millions of views, it can become enough to sustain a small team. With low costs and lower salaries in a place like Bihar, YouTubers are opening offices and hiring their stringers in villages. Yesterday’s local stringer has become today’s media micro-baron.
This media micro-baron wields huge local influence, and thus the politician needs to co-opt him. This centrality of YouTube to our political discourse makes YouTube and YouTubers critical in elections. For the last few years, we have seen how millions of people watch a certain kind of election reporting on YouTube. This is reporting where the reporter talks only to voters and voters of all kinds and gets a million different quotes.
Mainstream TV news, by contrast, focuses more on big rallies, big speeches and big interviews. The hallowed anchor goes around with a decked-up election bus talking mainly to politicians.
YouTube is the new teashop
Ordinary people often express their political views in simple language that is more persuasive than a whole speech by a politician. In the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, senior TV journalist-turned-star YouTuber, Ajit Anjum found a poor voter saying that he would vote for the BJP as he has eaten Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s salt — referring to the Hindi proverb that equates salt with loyalty. This was the impact of free rations. Anjum tells me that Modi mentioned this line in a speech.
These candid vox pop interviews are particularly powerful because the Indian voter likes to determine who everybody else votes for and then votes for the same winning candidate. The propaganda war before any election is precisely to create this sense of the universal hawa (popular sentiment).
Political candidates send workers masquerading as travellers to influence the hawa in the teashops. Today they have to worry about YouTubers. YouTube is where India’s 2024 general election will be fought.