James Innes-Smith

The problem with YouTube’s political adverts

  • From Spectator Life

Even a few seconds can feel like an eternity when your favourite Spectator TV debate is interrupted by a sweaty bloke in a bedsit flogging digital currency. YouTube understands how painful its ludicrous advertising interludes have become which is presumably why they invented the five-second skip button. Regular ads are bad enough but it’s those twenty-minute infomercials that somehow manage to catch us off guard that really grate. How does YouTube know when I am least able to reach for the skip button? It happened again the other day during my morning shower; midway through a favourite song a perky female voice barged in to ask whether it was ‘ok to call someone queer’. This didn’t sound like your average get-rich-quick scam – in fact it didn’t sound like an advertisement at all.

Turns out Google had interrupted my morning routine not to sell me life insurance but to ‘educate’ me about the importance of identity and ‘Allyship’. During the nine-minute sofa discussion perky Radio 1 minority presenters Nick Grimshaw (gay) and Clara Amfo (black) answered questions about each other’s ‘communities’, taking it in turns to prove how much they understood and were willing to learn about their various struggles, this being ‘the ultimate test of Allyship’. Honing in on all the latest identitarian talking points, Nick bemoaned the fact that he had learnt nothing about black history at school other than that black people were enslaved and even that took less than an hour of teaching time ‘before it was back to Queen Elizabeth.’ A finger wagging Clara jumped in to remind us that ‘black history is history’ with much nodding along from Nick – Allyship indeed.

Clara appeared to be saying that because we can all trace our ancestry back to the African savannah we are all in some way black, but doesn’t this undermine the point of Black History Month? Grimshaw’s derogatory tone made it perfectly clear what he thought of white history – stale, boring, reeking of the establishment.

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