YOUTUBE ISN’T HERE TO HELP YOU
I want to tell you something that YouTube told me this morning without meaning to.
I picked up the remote. I opened the search bar. Letter by letter, I slowly typed out my query.
TRUMP F
The algorithm offered me:
funny moments. falls asleep. fox news. farts at press conference.
It offered me ford plant and flips the bird on stage and fox and friends and falls down stairs.
I kept going.
TRUMP FA
Falling asleep. Falls down stairs. Face. Family history. Farmers. Family guy. Fat shot. Face creation 2k26. Favorite bible verse.
The man has a face creation video. On YouTube. That is a thing that exists and YouTube wants you to find it.
Fascism was nowhere to be found.
So I kept going.
TRUMP FAS
It didn't even wait for me to finish.
It jumped ahead on its own.
trump fast food
Already typed. Already decided. In faded gray letters sitting right there ahead of my cursor, like it couldn't wait to hand it to me.
Video thumbnails and more suggestions:
Trump fast food white house. Trump fast food commercial. Trump fashion. Trump first speech.
Multiple options. Ready and waiting. Confident.
This is what the algorithm looks like when it's eager to help you.
I added another letter.
At that moment, the algorithm might as well have told me to go fuck myself because what came next was beyond absurd.
TRUMP FASC
One suggestion appeared.
One.
Singular.
Trump fasching.
Fasching.
The German carnival festival.
Costumes. Bratwurst. Probably some lederhosen.
YouTube looked at what I was typing and decided:
Maybe he means the Bavarian festival.
I kept going.
TRUMP FASCI
Nothing. I added another letter.
TRUMP FASCIS
Nothing.
TRUMP FASCISM
I typed the whole damn word.
Letter by letter, alone, into a black search bar on a big TV in my living room on a Sunday morning in August 2026.
It watched me finish the word myself and said nothing.
No suggestions.
No help.
No acknowledgment that this is a thing people search for, a thing people think about, a thing that is, and I want to be very precise here, an accurate description of what is happening to this country.
I’m not here to tell you YouTube is the villain of this story.
The villain of this story is not an algorithm.
Algorithms don’t make decisions. They reflect the decisions of people who decided what the machine should and shouldn’t do, what words should autocomplete and which ones should be left to die half-finished in a search bar, what ideas are safe to surface and which ones are too true to recommend.
Somebody decided.
Somebody at a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars sat in a meeting or wrote a policy or trained a model and determined that the word fascism, in the context of the current President of the United States, should not be suggested.
Should not be made easy.
Should not be the thing the app helps you find.
You can find the farts.
You can find the face creation video.
You can find fasching, for the love of God.
You have to spell out fascism yourself.
And maybe that’s the whole thing, actually.
Maybe that’s what they’re counting on.
That most people won’t.
That most people will see the autocomplete suggestions and assume those are the only options, the sanctioned searches, the things worth looking for.
That the shape of the algorithm becomes the shape of the question becomes the shape of what people think is allowed to be asked.
I had finished typing the word.
I hit search.
The results were there. Thousands of them.
They’ve always been there.
The evidence is not hidden.
It’s just not recommended.
There’s a difference between information that exists and information that is handed to you.
There’s a difference between a word you have to type alone, letter by letter, with no help from the machine, and a word the machine finishes for you before you’ve even decided you’re sure.
They’re betting you won’t finish the word.
Finish the word.
Mass manipulation by media. Not new, but increasingly common. I'm old as dirt and still recall many decades ago a teacher said - "The media can't dictate how you think, but it manipulates what you think about." The advent of internet and social media has made media more powerful and more harmful.
Well, we all know the oligarch techbros who own the social media networks have a vested interest in keeping us distracted from their creeping takeover of the planet.