2.3: YouTube and Facebook as Drivers of Social Change

“YouTube is a place to give everyone a voice and show them the world,” the company proclaims. Founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees and acquired by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006, YouTube rapidly became one of the world’s most influential digital platforms. Today, it serves over 2.53 billion monthly active users (DemandSage, 2025; Business of Apps, 2025). Collectively, viewers watch nearly 1 billion hours of video per day, spending an average of 19 minutes daily on the platform (Global Media Insight, 2025; Measure Studio, 2025). Roughly 63% of watch time now comes from mobile devices (Awisee, 2025), and in India, adults reportedly watch more than 72 minutes per day as of 2025 (Times of India, 2025). These metrics underscore YouTube’s immense impact across entertainment, marketing, politics, and civic life.

Consider Russia. Leonid Parfyonov, once one of the country’s most respected journalists, was pushed off state television in 2004 after criticizing political interference in the media. As The Guardian reported, his dismissal symbolized a broader Kremlin-led effort to bring previously independent networks into alignment with state messaging (Harding, 2004).

In a widely discussed 2010 speech covered by Al Jazeera, Parfyonov argued that Russian television journalism had ceased to be journalism at all. Political and social information, he said, was so thoroughly controlled by authorities that TV served solely as a propaganda tool (Kern, 2010).

As broadcasting came under increasing state control, YouTube emerged as one of Russia’s most important alternative public spheres. Tens of millions of Russians turned to the platform for independent commentary, investigative reporting, and political satire—content largely excluded from state television (Kramer, 2010). In this sense, YouTube functioned as part of a hybrid media system, where legacy media control coexisted with more open, networked forms of communication (Chadwick, 2017).

However, this relative openness narrowed sharply following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Under Vladimir Putin, the government intensified its model of networked authoritarianism, selectively restricting digital platforms while maintaining enough connectivity to monitor and shape online discourse (MacKinnon, 2011). Major platforms such as Facebook and Instagram were blocked, while new laws criminalized the spread of “false information” about the military (Human Rights Watch, 2022). Although YouTube remained accessible, it operated under increasing pressure through content removals, legal threats, demonetization, and the forced exile of independent creators.

As a result, what once functioned as a relatively open alternative public sphere has become fragmented and precarious—illustrating how authoritarian regimes adapt to digital environments not by eliminating them entirely, but by reshaping their conditions of visibility, participation, and control. For digital media literacy, this shift underscores a critical lesson: access to platforms does not guarantee informational freedom, as power increasingly operates through the governance of infrastructures, algorithms, and legal constraints.

At its best, social media expands democratic expression by enabling users to share information rapidly, build communities, and mobilize for collective action. Facebook, like YouTube, became a central engine of digital democratization—a phenomenon technology journalist David Kirkpatrick famously called “the Facebook effect.” Kirkpatrick (2010) argued that Facebook revolutionized human connection by allowing people to organize around shared experiences and causes at unprecedented scale. Media scholar Daya Kishan Thussu similarly observes that Facebook reshaped global and intercultural communication, altering how social movements form and spread.

By 2025, Facebook (now under Meta Platforms) counted over 3.07 billion monthly active users, making it the world’s largest social network (DemandSage, 2025; Backlinko, 2025). Together with its family of apps—Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp—Facebook has become a digital empire.

Platforms such as Facebook, YouTube/Google, and X (formerly Twitter) played decisive roles in watershed social movements:

• The Arab Spring (2010–2011)
• Occupy Wall Street (2011)
• Black Lives Matter (from 2015)
• #MeToo (from 2017)
• Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests (2019)

In each case, social media awakened public consciousness, circulated firsthand accounts, and coordinated mass mobilization (De Choudhury et al., 2016; Etim, 2025). These platforms demonstrated their dual capacity to empower democratic participation—and, in other contexts, to amplify misinformation and extremist rhetoric.

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