A new lawsuit against YouTube shows how hard it is to get the company to respond to abuse

If you are an average person having a customer service problem with a large social network, historically your best recourse has been prayer. Oh sure, there’s a form you can fill out somewhere in the help tab of the app, recording that you have been harassed or impersonated or unjustly suspended. But communication from the social network itself is typically limited to some automated responses, often unsatisfying.

In the old days you might have dismissed some of these issues as a minor annoyance. But as the social networks have grown into monoliths and the pandemic has nudged even more of our lives online, these issues have come to feel more acute. What once felt like low-level customer service issues now seem more like questions of...

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