Viral Politics and the Democratization of Political Speech

This blog post was written by Monica Ancu, assistant professor at University of South Florida.

The rise of YouTube in political campaigns has an interesting undertone: user-generated videos with enough shock and awe value to make them viral and compete, at least in viewership, with candidate ads.

The last two presidential elections, 2004 and 2008, are marked by such clips. Who doesn’t remember The Jib Jab video “This is My Land”  where Bush quarreled Kerry over everything from nukes to ketchup? Or the “Obama Girl”, who proclaimed her crush on the (then) candidate to about 18 million of YouTube viewers?

You might laugh at, cry, love or hate these clips. What I’d like to know, as a researcher, is whether the opinion of another Internet user could possibly affect your political sentiments. So, as a researcher, I took one of the first viral ads of the early 2008 primaries and ran a little experiment.

The ad: Political consultant Phil de Vellis modified the famous Apple “1984” ad ( by replacing the image of Big Brother with the image, voice and message of Hillary Clinton. Within three days, the ad became the #3 most watched YouTube video of the day. Within three weeks, its viewership reached 1.5 million.   At the time, Clinton’s most popular official campaign video had barely over 12,000 views

The experiment: Participants in three conditions viewed the ad and were informed the producer was 1) anonymous source, 2) the Obama campaign (attacking Clinton) and 3) an independent, private citizen.

The result: Participants in all conditions changed their thermometer rankings of both Obama and Clinton to show increased liking of the candidate under attack (Clinton) and decreased liking of the candidate supported by the ad (Obama). This change in candidate rankings happened in all three experimental conditions showing that, on YouTube, all videos might be equal.  These results also support other studies that have noted that negative ad attacks on the character of a candidate may produce a boomerang effect in which the ad reduces the support of the attacker, not the attacked.

The ‘so what?’:  Good news for you, the average voter. It seems that your homemade political video can make a real impression on the rest of us. Could it be that the last half decade of social media immersion has made us more trustworthy of what our peers have to say? Is this a sign that future political candidates will compete for voters’ attention not only with their opponents but also with their own supporters? In an online world where we trust the knowledge of strangers (Wikipedia), live virtual lives (Second Life), and accept profile updates as news (Twitter and Facebook), being receptive to peer-produced political messages doesn’t seem that far-fetched. Be careful, though.  Attack advertising might not be the best way to help your preferred candidate, and indeed may boomerang back and hurt the candidate’s image.

Do you think that the fact that individuals can produce their own ads that can be just as powerful as candidate ones benefits our democracy or does the negative tone hurt our democracy?