WASHINGTON: A bubbly shopping guide, a charitable “Internetainerpreneur” and a comedian who wears green lipstick and eats ladles of cinnamon quizzed US President Barack Obama in a series of YouTube presidential interviews.

Bethany Mota, Hank Green and GloZell Green — video bloggers who between them have received more than 1.5 billion views on YouTube — were invited to talk to Obama about his recent State of the Union address.

For this year’s address, the US administration put a new emphasis on social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, to try and send the president’s new policy initiatives to a broader audience.

Obama has in the past been interviewed on YouTube, and frequently used social networks — without the filter of the mainstream media.