New York Times’s Kevin Roose profiled former Vox journalist and gay/Marxist activist on the front of the paper’s Business section Thursday in “A Thorn in YouTube’s Side Digs In Even Deeper."
Maza, whose Twitter bio refers to Tucker Carlson as a white supremacist, targeted conservative Steven Crowder in 2019. After Crowder mocked him as a “lispy queer,” YouTube was pressured into demonetizing Crowder’s YouTube videos. Yet in Roose’s telling, leftists have no influence at a YouTube dominated by dangerous “reactionary politics."
Roose was unswervingly celebratory of Maza and contemptuous of conservatives.
Carlos Maza believes that YouTube is a destructive, unethical, reckless company that amplifies bigots and profits off fascism.
Now it’s also his meal ticket.
Mr. Maza, 31, announced several weeks ago that he was leaving Vox, where he had worked as a video journalist since 2017, to become a full-time YouTube creator.
The move shocked some of Mr. Maza’s fans, who have watched him become one of YouTube’s most vocal critics for failing to stop a right-wing pile-on against him last year. The controversy that followed that campaign, which was led by a prominent conservative YouTuber, turned Mr. Maza into a YouTube mini-celebrity and made him a sworn enemy of the site’s free-speech absolutists. He received death threats -- and was temporarily forced to move out of his apartment.
Rather than swearing off YouTube, Mr. Maza, who is a New York-based socialist, decided to seize the means of his own video production.
Roose doesn’t bother cloaking his hostility toward Crowder, calling him “a bargain-bin conservative comedian.”
Maza himself, a fan of de-platforming, is no slouch at internet bullying. A tweet from May 2019, when leftists were assaulting conservatives with milkshakes: "Milkshake them all. Humiliate them at every turn. Make them dread public organizing."
Roose again betrayed his ideology.
YouTube can be harsh terrain for a professional leftist. The site is nominally open to all views, but in practice is dominated by a strain of reactionary politics that is marked by extreme skepticism of mainstream media, disdain for left-wing “social justice warriors” and a tunnel-vision fixation on political correctness.
In recent years, some progressive YouTubers have tried to counter this trend by making punchy, opinionated videos aimed at left-wing viewers... leftists like Natalie Wynn... and Oliver Thorn...
(Roose has actually shilled for them before).
But these creators are still much less powerful than their reactionary counterparts....
After describing Maza’s introductory video, Roose gushed:
It’s a funny, knowing skit, and it shows how familiar Mr. Maza is with the customs and culture of YouTube. He doesn’t wear a suit or plaster himself with stage makeup. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, or adopt a Walter Cronkite-like pose of objectivity.
Maza was pleased on Twitter: “Thanks to @kevinroose for a thoughtful piece about the need for progressives to make more cool shit on YouTube.”
Roose is notorious for his jittery 2019 front-page smear “The Making of a YouTube Radical – How the Site’s Algorithms Played Into the Hands of the Far Right.”
