The Intersection of Pop Culture and Politics on Social Media

Increasing Frequency of Political Content on Pop Culture YouTube

While I currently consume very little YouTube, I parse it periodically to see the emergent stream of topics and narratives. Post election and the inauguration of President Donald Trump, there appears to be more overtly right-leaning political content on pop culture channels. Reading posts on the https://www.politicalhive.org/ (@politicalhive) , a portal or "frontend" to political content on the Hive Blockchain, I noticed a post by @valued-customer, "The Threat is Real. Can the DOJ Defend DOGE?" . Reading the post I noticed that a video from YouTuber Yellow Flash was linked in the article. I'm familiar with Yellow Flash with his commentary on movies, games, and comic books - pop culture. Yellow Flash (YF) is a performative commentator making reactionary "rants" about left-oriented political influence within the pop culture segment. Over the past week YF's content is becoming more overtly political, covering Elon Musk, Trump-related material, USAID, and similar topics.

Climate Change, Social Media Climate Change that is

Yellow Flash in some ways is a barometer, or an indicator of a climate change on social media. While his audience for reactionary content has likely always had a more conservative ideological slant, YouTubers over the past four years have had to be somewhat careful about coloring between the lines. After a "community strike" over a year ago I personally chose to abandon the platform for my own content, but my participation was always at the hobbyist level. Professional YouTube creators like YF have had to self edit if not outright censor their own content to stay on the platform. Leading up to the 2024 election, big tech observably made explicit overtures to Donald Trump lead by Elon Musk. Following his election META's Mark Zuckerberg made the trip down to Mar-a-Lago to visit Trump, and went on Joe Rogan to offer a mea culpa for censorship on Facebook during the Covid Pandemid. Musk, Zuckerberg , and Jeff Bezos will are all guests of honor at Trump's inauguration.

With the ascendancy of MAGA politics, social media platforms seem to be substantially more permissive. Some of this may also be attributed to a crowded field for social media audience, users will gravitate to the platforms that allow the content and forms of expression they value. The dominant ideology here is advertisement and subscription revenue and not necessarily changes to the personal ideology of the Tech Titans. To retain audience abundant option, social media platforms have been forced to make some concessions to user preference.

In the aftermath of the election, particularly in the helter-skelter pace of Trump's policy implementations, much of America's conversation is impacted by politics, so it is not completely out of place for YF to devote more content to political topics. The audience moves to where it is engaged and entertained. Lamentations about a mythological perfect state are generally time wasted.

(Image crafted with a tediously revised, an intricate essay to Grok)

Yellow Flash can be found on Twitter at https://x.com/YellowFlashGuy
and on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@YellowFlashProductions

Social Media on the Hive Blockchain

You, dear reader, are likely reading this post on https://peakd.com/ a portal to social media on the Hive Blockchain. Content on Hive is substantially more censorship resistant than any legacy or traditional social media platforms. Articles viewed on PeakD will generally appear like content you will see on any other website though traditionally with substantially less advertisements. The content is more censorship resistant, because this very text is recorded permanently on the blockchain itself, and is available from dozens of interfaces and front ends.

Creating content on Hive does offer some distinct advantages compared to traditional social media. Readers who are Hive users can allocate value to this article via the Hive Reward Pool, an upvote here on Hive has monetary value. With the addition of @commentrewarder the readers who comment on this article will also get a proportional share of the value assigned to this post.