In the ongoing social media conflagration, Facebook has been drawing the most heat, followed by Twitter. But Google’s YouTube now seems to be making a bid to be justifiably recognized as its own special circle of internet hell.

Like these other sites that have become a swarming hive of disinformation, racism and hatred, YouTube has been offering platitudes about how it is trying to improve the content on its platform and weed out nastiness.

And yet not only has the company been failing to fundamentally stymie the awfulness that has taken root there, it seems to continue incentivizing the worst tendencies of the human race.

The most recent contretemps began with a tweet by Vox reporter Carlos Maza about relentless abuse he was receiving via the YouTube videos of right-wing “comedian” Steven Crowder:

So, I have pretty thick skin when it comes to online harassment, but something has been really bothering me. — Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) May 31, 2019

Maza’s tweetstorm included excerpts of Crowder videos using homophobic and racist slurs and detailed the harassments he’s suffered for years by Crowder fanboys. But he was particularly furious at YouTube for failing to enforce its own community standards.

YouTube’s initial response seemed stupefying. Five days after Maza’s tweets, the company at first said simply the Crowder videos did not violate its community standards. Then one day later, YouTube turned around and said it would no longer allow Crowder to monetize his videos because his channel had violated community standards:

Update on our continued review–we have suspended this channel’s monetization. We came to this decision because a pattern of egregious actions has harmed the broader community and is against our YouTube Partner Program policies. More here: https://t.co/VmOce5nbGy — TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) June 5, 2019

YouTube also took the opportunity to pat itself on the back for all the progress it has made while also slipping into the announcement that it has taking yet another step by “specifically prohibiting videos alleging that a group is superior in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status. This would include, for example, videos that promote or glorify Nazi ideology, which is inherently discriminatory. Finally, we will remove content denying that well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place.”

The next day, reporter Ian Scherr of Cnet posted a scathing look at how YouTube rewards the growing genre of hyper-angry outrage-seeking gaming video creators on its platform:

Starting last year, a new cadre of negative YouTube gaming commentators came to prominence. Almost in unison, they each enjoyed spikes in audience and view counts, attracting hundreds of thousands of subscribers. That translated into millions of views a week as they dissected the video game industry’s missteps, misadventures and controversies. The views get rewarded by YouTube in ad dollars.

YouTube was the subject of yet another bruising story two days later, this time by the New York Times’ Kevin Roose about a young man named Caleb Cain who was radicalized by alt-right videos on the platform:

Mr. Cain, 26, recently swore off the alt-right nearly five years after discovering it, and has become a vocal critic of the movement. He is scarred by his experience of being radicalized by what he calls a “decentralized cult” of far-right YouTube personalities, who convinced him that Western civilization was under threat from Muslim immigrants and cultural Marxists, that innate I.Q. differences explained racial disparities, and that feminism was a dangerous ideology.

Naturally, all these stories provoked a backlash from the far-right content creators who insist they are being oppressed by the machine of Silicon Valley. This, despite the massive bullhorn that social media platforms have given their views and the massive audiences they have accumulated.

All this fun practically obscured the story about how pedophiles were using YouTube to target kids.

That also prompted a policy change from YouTube that included measures like disabling comments on videos targeting younger audiences. Though it came in a blog post that mostly amounted a long self-congratulatory missive to all the amazing work YouTube is doing to stop this kind of thing.

Amazingly, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki seems to continue to sidestep the kind of personal fury directed at the likes of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. YouTube remains as much a part of our cultural fabric as those two social platforms.

For now, it appears YouTube’s addictive algorithms and bottomless well of content will continue to keep people coming back for more and forgive it for these endless and egregious sins.