Why are people dying at gender reveal parties?
These events have escalated to frightening, fascinating levels
Youtube
Friday
Thursday
Big Tech bans people who discuss election fraud. That’s a bad idea
In some cases, conversations about potential voter fraud can provide greater clarity
Tuesday
Jake Paul, the Great White Nope
The YouTuber makes the most of the outrage economy
Friday
Can you really blame Trump supporters for refusing to accept the election result?
Every institution has been against the President at every turn
Thursday
Ten films to help you celebrate Hallowquarantine
Answering the door to masked strangers isn’t the novelty it used to be
Monday
Sensei it again
The return of the Karate Kid
Monday
The Facebook ad boycott is a convenient virtue-signal
Whisper it, but social media ads weren’t all that effective in the first place
Monday
Dave Rubin is here to solve ‘95 percent’ of the internet’s problems
‘I’m not trying to create an exclusive safe space for my content because I’m afraid of what the world thinks’
Tuesday
Washington’s war on internet free speech
Republicans and Democrats are dueling to see who can write the worst policy
Friday
Ben Shapiro on YouTube: ‘if you approach an unspecified line, you’ll be downgraded or banned’
The tech giants have chosen time and again to censor certain voices and magnify and elevate others
Thursday
Steven Crowder and the folly of the internet playground
Thanks to YouTube and Twitter, we must all suffer through his juvenile spat with Carlos Maza
Thursday
Thank God for the return of the generation gap in pop
In June, a 20-year-old man called Jahseh Onfroy was murdered after leaving a motorcycle dealership in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Onfroy was a rapper, who recorded under the name XXXTentacion, and he had become extraordinarily successful — his two albums had reached No. 2 and No. 1 in the US, despite moderate sales, because of the amount of online plays they had received. The day after he died, my social-media timelines were full of music writers discussing his death, and the tenor — from those with kids, at least — was clear. Post after post noted that XXXTentacion was a nasty piece of work, and few should mourn him, yet the
Thursday
The vlogging fantasy that bewitches children
My friend’s ten-year-old daughter has a new hobby. Like many of her school pals, she hopes to become a video blogger — a ‘vlogger’. She has started to record clips of herself for others to watch, share and ‘like’. She showed me a few, then gave me a list of famous vloggers to watch: JoJo Siwa, iJustine, Noodlerella, Zoella. Their names sounded so bizarre. But they are totally familiar to tweenage girls. Like an earnest marketing executive, my friend’s daughter then explained to me that it was all a matter of numbers. If her videos are viewed 40,000 times on YouTube, she can have adverts placed on them; 100,000, and
Thursday
Kevin Allocca glosses over YouTube’s terrifying power
On 25 April 2005, Jawed Karim sent an email to his friends announcing the launch of a new video site — intended for dating — called youtube.com. Within 18 months, the site was being used to view 100 million videos a day. Last year it had more than a billion users, watching five billion videos every day, with creators uploading 300 hours of video to YouTube every minute. Given this almost incomprehensible scale, it’s fitting that the word Videocracy — the title of YouTube Head of Trends Kevin Allocca’s history of the site — evokes the idea of an authoritarian dystopia. Like any approved account from such a regime, its
