Will YouTube Be The Attack Dog of American Politics?

After my earlier post this week about Politicians and Social Media I received an email asking whether I thought that candidate ads that are run on YouTube would be subject to the same laws that govern television ads? And it is a great question. Currently the social networks seem to be free of any sort of government regulation and oversight as far as political ads are concerned. Slate had a great article last month on the impact that YouTube played in the Lieberman-Lamont race in Connecticut.

CNET summarized Lieberman’s defeat as:

“The Lamont campaign is the best example to date of a tech-savvy campaign,” says Zack Exley, who worked at liberal political action committee MoveOn.org when it first emerged during the 2004 elections and later did work for John Kerry’s unsuccessful presidential bid before branching out into nonprofit work. A tech-savvy campaign, he says, is one that “understands that the purpose of technology in politics is to get boots on the ground in the real world, and to actually sway voters and turn out voters in reality,” a point sometimes missed by campaigns grounded in the online realm.

Ultimately, I think that we will see Federal Election officials overseeing the political videos on the major social networks like YouTube and MySpace. When they do take control of YouTube and MySpace I believe that we will see a change in the way that candidates use these video platforms.

Traditional media focus on the amount of negative ads that campaigns run via traditional media outlets like TV, radio and print. I can envision a political strategy where a politician uses the traditional media outlets only for “positive messages”. This ad campaign would be focused on creating the public image of the perfect candidate. This type of ad campaign would generate lots of positive coverage in the mainstream press and appeal to the undecided voters who are fed up with negative campaigning.

At the same time, the candidate would use Internet video outlets like YouTube and MySpace for their “negative ads”. These ads will embolden the politicians core base and would be largely ignored by the mainstream press. In essence the candidate would turn YouTube into the attack dog of American Politics.

It’s not a pretty picture but it is something that I can envision happening.