organization, at the top, is asking what’s the right thing to do.
They’re asking what’s the least we can do to avoid this crisis.”
Maza suggested to me that he doesn’t think the platform
can be saved; our conversation made me think the real issue
is whether humanity can be. Therein lies the problem of You-
Tube and other social media platforms. When you invite the
world in, it’s hard to be retroactively selective. YouTube has
gotten a bit stricter with its content policies, mostly in the
wake of P.R. disasters like Maza’s situation. But there’s still a
continent of gray area—gray as far as YouTube’s rules are con-
cerned, at least—that makes the platform a pretty treacherous
place. What are slime videos doing next to people peddling
race science, anyway?
Kat Blaque is a sharp, insightful YouTuber who addresses
white supremacy and other urgent topics in spoken essays.
When I met her at VidCon, she was both energized and ener-
vated, explaining that the platform’s agnosticism is double-
edged. “On one hand, it allows people like me to be able to
speak up for themselves and to be heard and be seen in a
way that they wouldn’t have been in regular media,” she
says. “But, it also allows people like white nationalists to
organize and speak out in a way that, again, they wouldn’t in
regular media.”
Over breakfast one morning in Anaheim, I asked Andrea
Faville, YouTube’s corporate communications head, about its
strategy for mitigating all this troublesome content. “When
you have creators who have very large fan bases that can kind
of take on a life of their own, in terms of going after someone,
how do you take action, but also not hold creators account-
able for something they might have no control over?” she
asked in return. Which seemed a bit shifty, because of course
creators are not immediately responsible for what their fans
do, but they are still the ones inspiring those fans into action,
indirectly or not.
I pushed Faville for how YouTube positions itself as an
editorial entity. Clearly, it champions certain creators as shin-
ing beacons of the platform when the opportunity is conve-
nient, in marketing campaigns and whatnot. She gave me a
careful answer, and more questions: “I think about it less as
an editorial decision. It’s about our responsibility. There’s the
video hosting side of [YouTube], but it’s also a community. And
the question is, as a platform, what is our responsibility to that
community? How do we do this responsibly, while also keep-
ing this as an open platform where there are going to be a lot of
dierent opinions, a lot of dierent perspectives, a lot of dier-
ent types of speech? It’s tricky. I wouldn’t necessarily say we’re
Switzerland, but I think the vision is denitely that YouTube is
always going to be a place where lots of dierent communities
have an opportunity to share their perspective.”
That’s not a satisfying response to the question of how a
public company is going to handle the rampant and danger-
ous ideology on its platform—one that’s accessible for young
people, even those who innocently came to the site in search
of, say, video game content. Faville says YouTube is working
to address this stu in a methodical, thorough way, mostly
through enforcing increasingly stringent terms-of-use poli-
cies. Still, I thought about something that Blaque said to me:
“My thinking was, well isn’t YouTube going to feel guilty if
they allow white nationalism to incubate on their platform?
But, I’ve learned they have no legal responsibility. They only
care so much.”Attention-Seeking Introverts
Before traveling to VidCon I spent some time in Baltimore
with Natalie Wynn, an apostate of academia whose Con-
traPoints channel is a fount of funny, hard-hitting, gorgeously
articulated political discourse dressed up in drag-world fabu-
lousness. She showed me her windowless basement studio
lled with lighting equipment, wigs, and other air. Wynn
is often labeled, along with Blaque and others combating
far-right content, as a member of “LeftTube.” It was funny,
then, that this great campaign is partially launched from such
a humble space.
Wynn is reticent to give herself too much credit, or even
to accept the burden. Her growing following—which funds
her through Patreon—means that she can live as a full-time
YouTuber. That’s essentially her ambition at the moment,
and I found her enjoying a sense of artistic fulllment. If she
changes a heart or mind here and there along the way, well,
that’s nice too. Despite all the rancor she has received, Wynn
says she still loves her platform of choice. “YouTube is kind of
the perfect thing for me,” she told me in her soothing, instruc-
tive tone. “I don’t know what I would do without it. My par-
ticular needs as a person are met very well by YouTube. The
self-deprecating way to put it is, YouTube is the perfect venue
for attention-seeking introverts.”
That’s a refreshingly honest assessment. As was the con-
versation I had with Randy Sharp, a Manhattan theater direc-
tor who makes appealing, generous cooking videos for her
channel, Dinner Party Tonight. It has (for now) only 8,000
or so subscribers. We had a long meal together a few months
ago, during which Sharp told me about the intense feeling of
connection she shares with some of her fans. “I had one lady,
oh my God, [she] wrote me, she’s probably 40 or 45. She says,
‘My husband died unexpectedly and I’ve been holed up in my
house for two years. And I started watching your videos. My
husband and I used to entertain all the time, and it made me
sick to think about having people over.’ And—this sent me
over the moon—she says, ‘I just had some people over for the
rst time in two years.’ ”
I like what that says about YouTube’s purest possibility.
Reporting on the digital world is taxing, because it can make
one feel so irreducibly old and out of touch and alarmed about
the future. But YouTube stretches out with long arms, and
some of them do, somehow, reach good-enough places. When
I got home from my dinner with Sharp, I made myself a drink
and opened YouTube yet again, expectant and spent, and went
exploring. There was that planet, entire. Messy, roiling, and
lively in all its risky enthusiasm to be seen.How does one
feel secure in a forever
scaling and
demanding industry?
128 VANITY FAIR NOVEMBER 2019
SET DESIGN BY MARCS GOLDBERG; SPECIAL THANKS TO DARA ALLEN