I just found a very interesting article on why silly nonsense on sites like YouTube makes them very effective for dissidents trying to evade Big Brother. Like the books you read in philosophy class, it's long winded, but thought provoking, so I'll distill it into its main points:
 

• The most interesting little-guys are usually nobodies. It's difficult to trust self-defined activists because there's the lingering idea that they got what was coming to them. Empathy is easier to elicit for someone who gets spontaneously mauled by a bear than for the bugger who was throwing rocks at it. 

  People who are thrust into activism by the situation-at-hand don't know any better than to use the same tools they use in their personal lives (Blogger, YouTube, etc). for their causes as well. 

• Most of what people do on user-generated sites is both personally-valued and politically irrelevant. What if 100,000 people couldn't see pictures of their grandkids anymore because the Kremlin didn't want anyone to stumble upon a handful of compromising photos that also happen to be on Flickr? 100,000 new people would learn about the problem that censors were trying to keep on the down-low, and then they'd tell all their friends.