BP wants to be your friend on YouTube, users revolt

BP wants to be your friend on YouTube. In perhaps the biggest public relations fiasco to come out of the oil giant yet since the start of its massive unconfined oil spill off the Gulf Coast, BP has taken to spending money on YouTube ads which read “Friend BP on YouTube” and encourage users to click through BP’s official YouTube page where they can watch sanitized promotional videos which attempt to diminish the oil spill’s devastating impact. The YouTube move comes after BP was caught buying up keywords for Google search results, which skeptics viewed as being an attempt to drown out the negative third party coverage of BP which currently dominates such search results. BP’s YouTube ploy has not gone over well with the site’s users, who have revolted by rating the oil giant’s videos a mere one star out of five, a rating which humorously appears within the paid YouTube ads: