YouTube Outrunning the FEC?

I don't know if the title of Rich Lowry's piece at Real Clear Politics is accurate, but the anonymity of the video sharing site surely makes it the online video equivalent of Mrs. McIntyre's handbill in the same way that an anonymous or pseudonymous (is that a word?) blog is.

For now, the Federal Election Commission doesn’t have YouTube entirely in its officious grasp, and that’s a wonderful thing. It helps make the video-sharing Web site a robustly unregulated — and thus invaluable — political marketplace.

It’s no accident that the most memorable political advertisement in recent years was posted anonymously on YouTube, the famous 1984-themed anti-Hillary Clinton ad. A takeoff on an Apple Computer Super Bowl ad, the spot featured a woman in a Barack Obama T-shirt throwing a sledgehammer at a video screen filled with an ominous Hillary. The sledgehammer could just as well have been aimed at all the regulators, politicians, media pooh-bahs and professional hand-wringers who perennially worry that the political debate is too “uncontrolled” and set out to better control it.

Like most political technology "innovations," I think it may be too easy to acribe to the new model some sort of "earth shattering" importance to the big initial splash.

Will YouTube play a role in elections in the future? Without a doubt it will, but will the impact be so great as to fundamentally alter the manner in which elections are conducted and campaigns measured? I don't think so. YouTube will be a tool more of the dedicated "anti," someone opposed to a candidate or a cause that is willing to spend the time and effort to craft a video and the connections necessary to move past the tipping point in to viral status. That will be a rare video indeed that will have an impact. Even the "1984" ad attacking Hillary Clinton will have a minimal impact on the race.

Whether sites like YouTube will be regulated will be difficult at best and the current law does not appear to provide an avenue for the FEC to regulate YouTube or other video sharing services. Certainly, the "blogger" exemption would indicate that the FEC does not seem to think it has the power to regulate the services or the content posted by users. Congress will no doubt look at whether or not to regulate the content, perhaps even passing legislation to require disclosure of the creator. But coming on the heels of McCain-Feingold and its limitations on advertising prior to elections, such a move may not sit well politically. As was seen during the attempt to regulate bloggers, video posters on either side of the aisle may agree on nothing else but their ability to undertake their craft.

But YouTube already has its own mechanisms for determining the value of any given video. There are literally tens of thousands of politically relevant videos on YouTube, some will be good and other won't. Lowry points out at the end of his column:

Yes, there is plenty of vile and false material on the Internet. And things aren’t always what they seem — the anti-Hillary spot was created by a professional employed by a firm that was on contract with Obama. But the public can be trusted to separate the wheat from the chaff, which is its proper role in an open society. The hand-wringers look at the 1984 ad and see an awful trend, potentially dragging down our politics. Instead, they should see freedom. Get over it.

Congress still operates from the position that it must be the guardians of political discourse, but such a paternalistic stance treats the voters like children or worse like idiots. The American public is more than capable of determining value.