YouTube journalists want you HOOKED and WATCHING anti-trump content

21 Mar, 2025

Back in Trump’s first term, there were a bunch of ‘liberal’ YouTube channels that rose to prominence by making content critical of the government and Trump. The Sam Seeders, David Pakmans, and Brian Cohens, amongst a plethora of others.¹ There was a clear demand for voices making sense of how batshit crazy things were. Some of this content was useful and informative, but there were other things of note going on:

1. There is an aesthetic pleasure derived from this content. A desire, perhaps even an emotional need, to point out stupidity, dunk on it, ‘debunk’ nonsensical statements and even create a sense of community that there are still reasonable people not overtaken by sheer stupidity of fanatism.
2. There are economic incentives and platform-economical forces behind the production and sustainability of such content that inevitably shape and condition how it is made and how it perpetuates itself.

These things taken together mean that there is a desire to keep you there and an incentive to keep coming back. Content that is informative and succinct, that gives you what you need so you can quickly leave and get on with your day, would not thrive as well on these platforms. YouTube wants watch-time and creators want to get paid for their content, which means they craft it to make you stay longer, and to monetize your political engagement. The problem is that this content can be quite vapid, repetitive, and leave one stuck in this catastrophizing state where “everything is terrible, and I must keep watching and stay informed”. It can be quite morbid.

This time around, a new cohort of channels have begun making the rounds. Anticipating this, I wanted to stay away from these content loops, opting for healthier media intake.² But I’ve inevitably taken the bait, and the algorithm now constantly feeds me these videos. And, even if some of this was already present back in the first term, I have the impression that some of the content tactics have become more perverse, in uncomfortable ways. Titles like “Trump CRUSHES and BURNS mid-interview” or “Fox News ABANDONS Trump after INSANE speech” are published several times a day. Weeks go by and the same titles keep being published, which should be an indicator that something’s up. Fox cannot “ABANDON” Trump every third day, either they abandoned him, or they didn’t. These sensationalist titles feed off people’s fear of current events, and that very emotional need mentioned earlier to see these people do badly, to feel and believe that they’re doing badly and that things will have to change. The reality of the content in the videos is much milder. It often points at a minor slip up, a small disagreement or tiny pushback. The events they discuss are not insignificant, and they are often newsworthy in some sense, but the framing is disingenuous.

One could argue: “hey, that’s how independent media needs to operate in a platform economy to reach a broader audience, spread their message, and have more influence. This is good, actually. The clickbait is a tactical move to make more people aware of actual issues and criticisms they should be exposed to”. In response, we should ask ourselves: “How am I being made to feel?”, “What do the creators stand to gain?”, and “How does my engagement with this content translate into the world?”. Despite the fact that not everyone reacts the same to the same content, I want to venture out some potential responses to these questions.

The first thing is that these content creators stand to benefit from things being shit. There is a reason they become popular during Trump terms. There is a bait and switch taking place where political engagement is being transmuted into individual, economic action. This is evident in messages like “if you support what we do, subscribe and consider donating to join the fight against the fascists”. It frames your donation to their project as a form of activism, a form of fighting. There is also something to be said about the effects of understanding your identity through parasocial alignment with content creators. Who you follow seems to say more about your political beliefs than how you act in the world. This again concentrates collective action in an individual, and an identity association to that individual. Their individual success becomes a felt sense of the audience’s political effectiveness.

But the content is regurgitative, it doesn’t lead anywhere. It just reinforces one of two modes; either pervasive dread at the fact that everything is COLLAPSING and HORRIFYING, a sense of PANIC, which can feel paralyzing and demotivating, or a subdued sense of complacency that these people are getting their due: a satisfaction of the desire to see them CRASH and BRUN and fail miserably at their attempt to install themselves as authoritarian leaders. These videos can give the sense that the situation is so unsustainable, that Trump is so grossly incompetent and sloppy, that he can lose the grip at any moment, and everything will revert to how it was. The viewer is subdued and made to feel good by hearing about every single mistake, and they can get the satisfaction of seeing Trump fail as long as they keep watching and supporting.

This obfuscates the grim reality that Trump has a bigger hold on the public than many would like to think. The reports of Trump’s death have been greatly exaggerated. And in the process, we lose sight of the ways in which they remain effective and maintain power even when “destroyed with facts and logic” by independent media outlets.

It is not that these channels lie, but that they keep the viewer in a stupor, produced by platform dynamics, where content consumption becomes a main form of engagement, and we become hooked on videos giving updates of the current situation. Of course some viewers can watch these videos and also be politically active, and I also don’t mean to say that there is no value at all from having opposing voices reach broader audiences. But on the whole, we should look at the social dynamics that are created by these forms of engagement, and how the medium shapes that engagement.

#blog