Amanda Hess

Since its 2005 debut with the slogan “Broadcast Yourself,” YouTube has positioned itself as a place where any people with camera phones can make a career of their creativity and thrive free of the grip of corporate media gatekeepers. But in order to share in the advertising wealth a user base of more than a billion can provide, independent producers must satisfy the demands of YouTube’s unfeeling, opaque and shifting algorithms.

YouTube’s process for mechanically pulling ads from videos is particularly concerning, because it takes aim at whole topics of conversation that could be perceived as potentially offensive to advertisers, and because it so often misfires. It risks suppressing political commentary and jokes. It puts the wild, independent internet in danger of becoming more boring than TV. If YouTube wants to fulfill its promise of an online environment where independent creators can make interesting work, it will find a way to scrub ads from truly vile content without penalizing the merely controversial.

These days, even a labor strike can be corporatized and repurposed as public relations. The typical refrain from brands that take on a cause is that they are “using their platform” to “raise awareness” about an issue. But the internet has complicated the transaction. Modern news audiences are bombarded with too much information, and right now, it all seems to be news for or against President Donald Trump. Brands that enter the fray aren’t so much “raising awareness” as they are jostling for their own messaging to be seen amid the rush of signals.

President Trump’s election has sparked great interest in civic engagement — joining community groups, organizing protests, showing up at town hall meetings. The resistance brand presents another option: Buy this thing, not the other. Is that the kind of awareness that needs to be raised?

As the media class struggles to understand an election result few foresaw, some have blamed a quirk of modern technology. So media and tech companies are pivoting, selling us a whole suite of offerings aimed at bursting the bubbles they helped to create.

In his manifesto, Mark Zuckerberg spoke of the need to grow local news outlets (which have seen their prospects plummet even further as Facebook tightens its grip as a leading source of news) and present people with a range of perspectives. Whether those sentiments make their way into every feed remains to be seen — after all, Facebook became an internet superpower by serving up easy, compulsively clickable content. Some Americans are interested in peeking outside their filter bubbles right now, which gives tech companies an incentive to cater to their desires. Will they feel the same way when they’re winning again?

On social media, our political battles are increasingly automated. People who head to Twitter to discuss their ideals are, often unwittingly, conversing with legions of bots: accounts preprogrammed to spew the same campaign slogans, insults or conspiracy theories hundreds or thousands of times a day. And one of their most competitive battlegrounds is the prime digital real estate that opens up every time President-elect Donald J. Trump tweets. Any supporters or critics who reply quickly enough to Mr. Trump can see their own tweets showcased right beneath the biggest spectacle on Twitter. But in this fast-draw contest, propaganda bots always best human beings.

When the white nationalist leader Richard B. Spencer was suspended from Twitter recently, he hopped over to YouTube to address his supporters. “Digitally speaking,” he said, Twitter had sent “execution squads across the alt-right.” He accused Twitter of “purging people on the basis of their views,” calling it “corporate Stalinism.” Then he mapped out a path forward. “There’s obviously Gab, which is an interesting medium,” he said. “I think that will be the place where we go next.”

Gab is a new social network built like a hybrid of Twitter and Reddit — posts are capped at 300 characters, and the crowd votes to boost or demote posts in the feed. But Gab’s defining feature is its user guidelines, or rather, its lack thereof. Gab bans illegal activities — child pornography, threats of violence, terrorism — and not much else. Think of Gab as the Make America Great Again of social sites: It’s a throwback to the freewheeling norms of the old Internet, before Twitter started cracking down on harassment and Reddit cleaned out its darkest corners. And since its debut in August, it has emerged as a digital safe space for the far right, where white nationalists, conspiracy-theorist YouTubers, and minivan majority moms can gather without liberal interference.