YouTube propaganda

Full story: An American mega-influencer flew to Lithuania. Then the chaos began.

When the YouTube mega-streamer IShowSpeed walked shirtless recently off a private jet into the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, the nation’s economy minister was waiting for him on the tarmac with shots of šaltibarščiai, a cold pink beetroot soup.

A mob of chanting fans was waiting, too, so the streamer — a 20-year-old from Cincinnati named Darren Watkins Jr., who has 120 million followers across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube — piled with his security detail into a minibus to drive to the city’s historic Palace of the Grand Dukes, where the mayor served him cheese and honey, and a troupe of young Lithuanian women taught him a traditional folk dance.

“These lyrics are about stabbing someone in the heart,” one woman said, with a smile.

Speed, as his fans call him, became famous during the pandemic for his hyperactive, hours-long broadcasts, where he’d rage about video games, leap over Lamborghinis and perform unprompted backflips. But lately, his real star power has come from his international tours, during which he blitzes into foreign countries to see the sights while surrounded by screaming teenagers, all of it live-streamed.

Speed’s TikTok-era travelogues often descend into chaos, but government officials have learned to love them nevertheless. His two-week trip through China this spring, where he fawned over the country’s state-of-the-art phones and luxury cars, went so viral that the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper hailed it as a “digital-age Marco Polo journey.”

“The U.S. has spent billions on anti-China propaganda, only to be undone by … IShowSpeed,” one report by the state news agency Xinhua said, citing a YouTube comment.

My video breakdown:

On paper:

Thanks for reading. Let's talk: [email protected].