Google enlists YouTube stars for U.S. voting campaign

“#voteIRL” is Google’s latest project to convince young people to vote.

The campaign launches today with a promotional video starring YouTube celebrities Bethany Mota, Kingsley, Hank Green, and Hannah Hart. It also features a series of videos that last 1:34 — the time YouTube believes it takes to register to vote in the U.S. — featuring Ryan Seacrest and other prominent YouTube users.

This isn’t the first time Google has targeted YouTube’s relatively young audience to seed an interest in politics. YouTube collaborated with PBS in 2008 and Barack Obama in 2012, and Google has created voting and campaign tools for the 2016 U.S. election and plenty of others abroad. It’s also become something of a trend for politicians to announce their candidacy on YouTube.

YouTube’s latest campaign ties into Google’s registration tool and will see the video network (which is expanding beyond video) host livestreams of the upcoming 2016 presidential debates “from more news organizations than ever before, including PBS, The Washington Post, and Telemundo,” according to YouTube’s blog.

YouTube’s press release says, “while people are clearly absorbed with the election online, we want to make sure they get involved in real life, too.”

Let’s just hope the trolls living under YouTube’s comments section don’t see this.