In the age of celeb PSAs and 30-second spots, it's always refreshing to see a beautifully-edited, stylistically-sound video that advocates for a cause. Here's a great example, just released today (it's so well done, you may not even realize it's seven minutes long):
Yesterday we saw a humorous video about homelessness, today it's a gorgeous mini-doc about war in Congo. Could this be a positive trend of interesting cause videos? Hopefully there's more to come...
Dan Savage, author of the popular sex advice column "Savage Love," just announced his new YouTube channel to provide support to LGBT teens who are being bullied or discriminated against. The channel, titled "It Gets Better" is Savage's response to the large number of gay youth who have written to him asking for guidance and advice. Here's the video Savage created to launch the channel with his husband Terry:
Future videos will come from other role models who will help encourage gay teens that life gets better after high school. Savage has definitely chosen the right place to launch his project - from Tyler Oakley who made a viral video combating hate speech to Michael Buckley who is one of YouTube's most popular partners to David Jacques who has made several videos championing various causes, YouTube is full of LGBT role models. Here's hoping that Savage will consider using some of YouTube's most famous faces to bolster this inspirational project.
Protesters affiliated with Climate Ground Zero chained themselves to equipment at a coal mine owned by Massey Energy in Marfork, West Virginia. The activists, who say they're trying to call attention to the environmental damage caused by mountaintop mining, were reportedly arrested and charged with trespassing.
Environmental activists in Kharkiv, Ukraine documented a June 1 confrontation with workers assigned to cut down trees in Gorky Park. According to a blog post here, the tree removal was part of a government plan to ease traffic on the city's main thoroughfare, Sumska Sreet.
User name: iskremas Date uploaded: June 2 Location: Gorky Park, Kharkiv, Ukraine Views: 9,869 Synopsis: At the start of the video, lumbermen dressed in black link arms and push through the activists' defense line. At 2:12, a worker cuts down a tree, which falls onto a nearby tree occupied by an activist. A fist fight and shoving match ensue. The lumbermen continue cutting trees (3:54) around the tree sitter in hopes of forcing him out of his perch. His fate is unclear from this clip. According to the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, 10 activists were arbitrarily arrested shortly afterward.
If you've ever wanted the chance to share your ideas about how to change the world with officials in the Obama Administration and filmmakers at Sundance, here it is.
We're bringing the Film Your Issue competition to YouTube this year as part of our Video for Change program. Film Your Issue is a contest for the next generation of global thinkers and social entrepreneurs (ages 14 to 24) to share innovative ideas for improving society. All you have to do to enter is create a three-minute video outlining a front-burner issue and proposing a solution to that issue, and submit it to the Film Your Issue channel. Learn more here:
Prizes include having your winning video shown to senior Obama administration officials in D.C., flying to L.A. for an awards show with Sony Pictures, a Student Pass to the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and Apple products like a Macbook or iPod Touch. Winners will be selected by a VIP Jury, including Tom Brokaw, our own Chad Hurley, Yoko Ono and Nicholas Kristof, and by public voting on YouTube.
Visit www.youtube.com/filmyourissue to enter before April 19 and peruse past finalist videos, including last year's winner, which tackled Hurricane Katrina's aftermath:
From the Iran protests to the uprising of monks in Burma, YouTube has become a place where citizens can expose human rights violations and promote free expression. This month, we were excited to see many of you help the organizations that regularly combat injustice and abuse around the world, by creating a video for one of them through Video Volunteers.
Spurred by Morgan Freeman's heartfelt call-out video and International Human Rights Day, which occurred earlier this month, you submitted videos on behalf of nonprofits working on issues like conflict minerals, the situation in Darfur and sex trafficking:
Today, the top three selections will appear on the YouTube homepage to raise awareness of several pressing human rights issues. We're also featuring Morgan Freeman's "volunteer" video for Amnesty International, which uses claymation to discuss the power of words in fighting injustice:
We'll be back with another round of Video Volunteers in January and our spotlight issue will be the arts, so if you're an arts organization who would like a volunteer to create a video for you, please fill out this form and your opportunity will be posted to the Video Volunteers channel.
This morning, six members of the Rainforest Action Network scaled up to the observation deck of Niagara Falls and dropped a 70-foot banner to protest the use of tar sands oil. See the banner unfurling for yourself, here:
The dropping of the banner was timed to coincide with a meeting between President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which will take place tomorrow. According to the Rainforest Action Network, Canada provides more than 19% of U.S. oil, and over half of this is made from tar sands. RAN also asserts that the production of tar sands oil emits three times as much greenhouse gas as regular oil.
The activists were arrested, but in true social media fashion, they've been tweeting from jail about their experience.
South by Southwest received over 2200 panel proposals for next year's Interactive Festival in Austin, and many of them look pretty amazing. One of the neat things about SXSW is that community voting plays a large role in whether a panel is actually presented at the conference -- using the SXSW "Panelpicker" interface, citizens can vote "yes" or "no" on whether they'd like to see a particular panel.
Though it's a crowded field, we've thrown our hat into the ring with a panel called, "Digital Protests: Social Media as Activism," and we'd appreciate it if you'd vote it up and share it with others (we think it's a pretty fascinating topic given recent events). Here's a brief description:
This session will explore the role that social media plays in protests, through the lens of recent events like Iran and the American health care debate. The panel will cover the various tools (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook) that are being used to elevate protests, examine the benefits and drawbacks of the internet's involvement and whether social media makes protests more or less efficient, and discuss the issue of authenticity in information dissemination.
But our panel isn't the only one we're excited for. Here's a list of other panels that are making us wish we were already in Austin:
Next Generation Politics: Where Will We Go Next?: In 2000, candidates used e-mail and websites to transmit their messages online. 2004 introduced political blogs and in 2008, social media played a major role in the election. As the 2010 election approaches and we look to 2012, what's next? A panel of national experts will predict.
Crowd Sourcing Innovative Social Change: Social media builds buzz and raises money, but what about real, on-the-ground change? The Social Change Challenge will crowdsource innovative ideas from nonprofits to change the world.
Your Friends: The Newest Breaking News Channel: When Michael Jackson died, where were you?...on the web, that is. Social media tools are playing an incredibly powerful role in uniting people around the world in awareness, conversation and action around breaking news and global current events.
Service 2.0: Evaluating Next-Gen Volunteer Opportunity Platforms: Forget about the high school community service club. The next generation of volunteering platforms is here -- from Google's All for Good to the President's Serve.gov. But can they also combat apathy? We'll speak with experts about recent efforts to revolutionize the service space and see what gaps remain.
UX Fortune-Telling Case Study: The Future of YouTube: YouTube's early and rapid success as well as its agile development process has made it complicated to look further into the future to see the potential paths for evolving the user experience and visual design of the site. Margaret Stewart will share a case study of how she and her team facilitated a company-wide collaborative exploration of YouTube's future, and the impact this work had on short term efforts and long term planning.
CrowdControl: Changing the Face of Media or Hype?: A discussion about the new media democracy, citizen journalism and the wisdom of the crowd. We already live in an interactive society but this global proliferation and escalation exemplifies the value of the wisdom of the crowds. The panel will discuss core tenets of this theory and how it is affecting current and future digital media business models.
Blogger's Second Decade: Is Blogging Still Relevant?: Blogger turned 10 in August, 2009. Is blogging (and Blogger) still relevant in an age of Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook? This talk will discuss the history of blogging and look at its future, and share creative examples of how blogging will remain relevant for the next 10 years.
Online Video Killed the Publishing Star: This next generation is using online video as their first stop for news, information, and even scholarly research. In this group, print media is deader than MTV. How can print-based publishers compete in this visual era? Should they compete, or is there still an audience that wants to read news?
Evolution of Online Video: The state of online video has changed dramatically since the first video went online in the early 90s. This panel assembles a group of industry leaders to speak about the evolution of online video since its inception until now and weigh in on emerging trends for the future of online video.
Voting closes on September 4 so get your votes in before then!
They may be Muggles, but that isn't stopping a group of Harry Potter fans, called the Harry Potter Alliance, from using their "powers" for good. According to this Newsweek article, the group isn't using broomsticks or spells to change the world -- they're using YouTube and social media to kill off real-world villains -- poverty, illiteracy, and genocide.
Says the article, "through blogs and YouTube videos, they've raised more than $15,000 in aid for Darfur and Burma and donated 14,000 books to children in need worldwide."
Hear more about the HP Alliance from its founder, Andrew Slack:
In this Sunday's New York Times, Thomas Friedman highlighted ten young climate activists who drove plug-in electric cars all over India. Their mission was to highlight potential solutions to the climate crisis and inspire citizens and companies to take action to decrease their burgeoning carbon footprint.
These activists, who belong to an organization called the Indian Youth Climate Network, chronicled their entire 2100-mile trip on YouTube, creating 35 videos about how Indians were tackling energy problems in rural villages, on college campuses, and in overpopulated cities:
As the group posted footage to YouTube, other people joined their movement. Says Friedman, "A Bollywood dance group joined at different stops and a Czech who learned about their trip on YouTube hopped on with his truck that ran on vegetable-oil waste."
Does for-profit activism exist? A new initiative called Carrotmob is trying to find out, and they're using YouTube and other social media to help them along the way, according to a recent article in the Economist.
The idea is an interesting economical experiment -- activists challenge local retailers to prove how green they can be. The greenest store is rewarded with a slew of citizens buying them out of all of their merchandise, essentially proving in a very direct way that environmentalism and revenue generation can go hand-in-hand.
You might have seen this Corn Refiners of America ad on television, which purports that high-fructose corn syrup isn't that bad for you.
Citizens are begging to differ -- many have uploaded parodies of the ad to YouTube, making the case in creative ways that high-fructose corn syrup does indeed lead to health problems:
Though many of these ads are made in jest, they are also excellent examples of citizens holding corporations and issue lobbies responsible for the information they disseminate to the public.
Since August of this year, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has seen 250,000 Congolese citizens forced to flee their homes. As the death toll and refugee counts increase, people on the frontline of efforts to help are utilizing YouTube to speak out against the violence.
Nonprofit organizations are using the site to raise awareness about the conflict and to raise funds that are desperately needed to provide food, medicine and sanitation for the refugees. UNICEF uses video to explore a day on the ground at one of the refugee camps in DR Congo, while Doctors Without Borders depicts the struggles of the displaced through a powerful slideshow. And if you'd like to contribute more than just your viewership, the Disasters Emergency Committee recently posted an appeal on behalf of the UK's 13 leading charities for YouTube users to donate funds:
Individual YouTube users have also been raising their voices to demand that more be done to end the fighting. This UK citizen asked Prime Minister Gordon Brown why he recently spent more time talking about British celebrities than the dire situation in DR Congo.
You can join this important conversation -- if you have thoughts about the humanitarian crisis, please add them in the comments or detail them in a video.
While Republican Party leaders and elected officials deliver addresses each night to excited delegates and guests at the Republican National Convention, there has been a lot of action outside the perimeter of the Xcel Center as well.
The St. Paul police department issued reports of some protesters slashing tires, breaking windows and attacking members of the Connecticut delegation. Meanwhile, YouTube users have been uploading footage of riot police unleashing tear gas and pepper spray on throngs of protesters, and making mass arrests.
Journalists have been among those arrested, the most notable case being liberal talk show host Amy Goodman. This YouTube video documenting Goodman's arrest has garnered close to 500,000 views thus far and has set off a number of user responses. CitizenTube caught up with Goodman in St. Paul for her thoughts on what happened to her:
Despite arrests, a number of citizen journalists are continuing to follow the protest activity and uploading their footage to YouTube, so check back for up-to-the-minute accounts of what's happening in St. Paul, both inside and outside the convention hall.
In his "Generation Q" op-ed, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman asserted that young activists today are a little "too quiet, too online" for their own good, and that clicks of a mouse cannot rival the vitality of an in-person movement. But what if young activists could combine the in-your-face nature of an offline campaign, with the internet's ability to spread their message to millions?
The Harvard Right to Serve Tour is using YouTube to do just that. As part of the the Tour, openly gay Harvard University students are visiting military recruitment centers across the Eastern Seaboard, trying to enlist – and uploading video footage of each encounter onto YouTube.
"We're trying to show the country the discriminatory practices that are in place, under 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'," says lead campaign organizer and Harvard Divinity School student Jake Reitan. But in addition to that, the campaign is also demonstrating the power of what can happen when activists mix traditional tactics like sit-ins, sign-waving, and submitting to arrest, with new media methods like YouTube to amplify their cause.
CitizenTube is YouTube's News and Politics Blog. Here you'll find important breaking news videos from citizens; developing trends in the use of YouTube by news organizations, activists, politicians, and governments; and lots of other YouTube goodness. Hit us up on Twitter, @citizentube, if you see something worth posting here.
