By Dawn Chmielewski and Rollo Ross
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – When social media personality Alex Choi saw the raging wildfire in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, he grabbed his camera and dirt bike and went to document the devastation.
His video capturing fire-engulfed homes, embers flying through the air and an elderly man using a garden hose to protect his home has attracted nearly 673 million views on the messaging app Snapchat.
“I love documenting situations like this,” said the 25-year-old Choi.
Choi gained Internet fame with automotive exploits, including a YouTube video stunt featuring an airborne helicopter shooting fireworks at a speeding Lamborghini last year that landed him in hot water with law enforcement.
Now he says he wants to focus on documenting news events for those who learn about what is going on in the world through vertical videos shared on social media.
Social media platforms like Snapchat play a critical role in how younger adults get information, according to Pew Research. The organization found that about one-third of U.S. adults regularly get their news from Facebook and Google’s YouTube, while Instagram, TikTok, X and Snapchat help fill out the news diet, particularly among younger people.
Snapchat has more than 443 million daily active users, the vast majority of whom are between the ages of 13 and 24 years old. A number of people used the video-sharing app to document their experience during the wildfires, including reality television personalities Paris Hilton, Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag.
Choi rode a dirt bike through the fire zones, enabling him to access difficult-to-reach areas like Will Rogers State Park. Every home in the neighboring community was ablaze, he said, except for one, which the elderly man was defending with a hose. Choi said he stopped to help, and encouraged the man to leave, but the gentleman declined to evacuate.
“I went back at like 7 a.m. in the morning, several hours after,” said Choi. “And lo and behold, his was the only house that I saw in Will Rogers.”
Choi said he had the age of Snapchat’s community in mind as he set out to capture the images from the wildfires.
“I make sure that all my stuff is not too disturbing to watch as a 13- or 14-year-old kid,” said Choi. “And it still delivers like eye-opening news to the younger audience that watches everything on a phone.”
(Reporting by Dawn Chmielewski and Rollo Ross in Los Angeles, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
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