Seventeen times on his first work day of the new year in Washington, the president thumbed his thumbs at convention. The objects of his attention had a vast and seemingly disconnected range, from taunting Kim Jong-un about his nuclear prowess to flaunting his own successes. But there was more. He made an only-in-the-Trump-era kind of news by announcing a reality-style creation unique in presidential history: awards for the “most dishonest & corrupt media.”

The makers of the popular news app Jinri Toutiao unveiled moves this week to allay rising concerns from the authorities. Last week, the Beijing bureau of China’s top internet regulator accused Toutiao of “spreading pornographic and vulgar information” and “causing a negative impact on public opinion online,” and it ordered that updates to several popular sections of the app be halted for 24 hours.

In response, the app’s parent company, Beijing Bytedance Technology, took down or temporarily suspended the accounts of more than 1,100 bloggers that it said had been publishing “low-quality content” on the app. It also replaced Toutiao’s “Society” section with a new section called “New Era,” which is heavy on state media coverage of government decisions. 

“The Iranian government is active on Telegram, as is the president, and members of Parliament,” she said. “Iranians use it to sell clothes or find doctors, she added. “In the last week it has become a key source of information about the protests.”

In a Dec. 31 blog post, Pavel Durov, chief executive of Telegram, which is based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, wrote that the company had previously complied with requests by the Iranian government to shut down access to “channels” that called for violence during the protests. But, he added, the company “refused to shut down channels of peaceful Iranian protesters.”

Although YouTube may want to erase the Paul nightmare from its site, YouTubers know the company’s rules and can subvert the system. With the body censored, YouTube either has to find a new violation of its guidelines or treat re-uploads as a copyright issue — but Paul doesn’t seem to care if people repost his work.

Twitter didn’t give Trump the power to engage in dangerous nuclear brinksmanship, and Twitter can’t take that away from him, either. It was granted to him by the American electorate, and it’s backed by such institutions as the Constitution, Congress, the military, and the judiciary. If you don’t want an egomaniacal man-child to have that power, those are the levers to push on—not Twitter, Facebook, his cellphone company, his hairdresser, or whoever manufactures the microphones in the White House briefing room. No-platforming may have its uses, but it doesn’t work on the president of the United States.

Since its founding in 2004, YouTube has been the standard for sharing video on the web. So much so that YouTube isn’t just a video provider — it is web video, and has been so for more than a decade. And only now that YouTube has cemented its place in the web firmament, and turned itself into an unshakable pillar of the internet, are we beginning to reckon with how vast, influential — and potentially dangerous — the site is. If 2017 was the year of the great Facebook backlash, 2018 is shaping up to be YouTube’s turn.

“I think that any analysis that continues to focus on these incidents at the level of the content creator is only really covering part of the structural issues at play,” says Sarah T. Roberts, an assistant professor of information studies at UCLA and an expert in internet culture and content moderation. “Of course YouTube is absolutely complicit in these kinds of things, in the sense that their entire economic model, their entire model for revenue creation is created fundamentally on people like Logan Paul.”

And here’s the thing: if you’re a woman who finds this triggering — who thinks that lots of time spent looking at these images is bad for our overall mental health and sense of self-worth, or that the sheer quantity of this stuff says something really depressing about our value as women in the world — there isn’t really a way to opt out of it. Honestly, that seems like a design flaw, to me!