[waterhouse]

Well, I could simply point to the entirety of Taibbi's article. Or even just the headline and sub-headline: "[It's] Un-American, Wrong, and Will Backfire. Silicon Valley couldn't have designed a better way to further radicalize Trump voters." Many of the points I might make, Taibbi did so in his article.

For the sake of novelty, I'll make a different point: I see one way in which YouTube may have promoted democracy: by making their odiousness more clear (and in a public, "everyone knows that everyone knows" way), they may have encouraged quicker production or adoption of alternative platforms. This seems unlikely, because websites like them have done lots of crappy stuff before, without usually causing much effect; but it is possible that this may be seen as enough of a "They've declared war on the entire right wing" to motivate a significant migration. Two partisan platforms is better than one, for democracy and just for competition. (Better yet would be either a platform that has made some kind of enforceable and very-painful-to-break commitment to neutrality, or some kind of decentralized system that no single company or party can decide to censor. We may get there eventually.)