US President Barack Obama's virtual 'hangout' US President Barack Obama spoke about the health of the economy and drone attacks in Iraq during an interview with YouTube and Google. President Obama logged onto Google Plus for the Oval Office's first virtual 'hangout'. Obama hosted the video chat to answer questions about last week's State of the Union address, with many of the queries determined by YouTube voting. We are starting to see some signs that the economy is picking up. We've created three million jobs over the past 22 months and we saw the largest boost in manufacturing jobs that we've seen since the nineties," Obama said during the video chat session. The discussion was streamed on Google Plus, the White House website and the White House's YouTube channel. President Obama was asked a question about the New York Times report that claimed unarmed drones were being used in Iraq to protect US diplomats. Obama said "We are very careful in terms of how it's been applied. I think that there's this perception somehow that we're just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy nilly, this is a targeted, focused effort. He added: "It is important for everybody to understand that this thing is kept on a very tight leash." President Obama has previosuly embraced social media's younger demographics to answer questions in Twitter and Facebook "townhalls."