The White House is distributing government-produced, anti-drug videos on YouTube, the trendy Internet service that already features clips of wacky, drug-induced behavior and step-by-step instructions for growing marijuana plants.
The decision to distribute public service announcements and other videos over YouTube represents the first concerted effort by the U.S. government to influence customers of the popular service, which shows more than 100 million videos per day.
The administration was expected to announce its decision later Tuesday. It said it was not paying any money to load its previously produced videos onto YouTube’s service, so the program is effectively free. Already by Tuesday, thousands of YouTube users had watched some of the government’s videos.
