> And whether you agree with what's "allowed" and what isn't, the very proposal of a corporation pretty much dictating public opinion is a terrible idea.
Here's the problem, as I see it.
Pre-social media, we had professional media companies - ranging from the large to the small. They, more or less, operated under generally agreed-upon rules. (one cardinal rule was that you do NOT run a paid story as if it was written as a news story, another is "don't print blatant lies or even gross misrepresentations". More on that later). They were seen as generally ethical because they actually were ethical in almost every case.
They were entrusted with presenting and filtering the news accurately and objectively, and in many cases, trying to eliminate spin. This made them de facto gatekeepers. They did a pretty good job of it too.
The rules started to bend with Fox News (originally envisioned as GOP TV), which took the position that "the mainstream media is made up of a bunch of liberals, so we're going to tell you the *real* truth". It's a whole other debate as to whether their premise was accurate or bullshit, but it is beyond debate that Fox presents a conservatively-slanted view of "news" that is supposed to be "the real truth".
Since Fox started, conservatives pushed this angle heavily, deliberately discrediting the "lame-stream media" incessantly. Now, it is "conventional wisdom" among many, even most people that "mainstream media" simply shouldn't exist - that the gatekeepers were somehow keeping us from the "truth".
That set the stage for blogs and social media. News that is produced by individuals - no filters, no gatekeeping. I admit, it sounded great to me too when I first thought about it. Combat any media bias with more media that present your side of things.
But there is a huge, huge problem with that model. It is too susceptible to fraud and lies. And in fact, it lends itself to fraud and lies because the entire false premise is that the more "mainstream" media is, the more likely it is to be corrupted or "fake news". The smaller players are lionized despite their hidden agendas and lack of standards enforced by reputation. The larger players are demonized because they are "corporations dictating the public opinion".
In other words, people believe "Tyler Durden" of ZeroHedge *more* because he's telling them stuff that they can't read elsewhere. It doesn't occur to them that they're not reading it elsewhere because so much of it is bullshit propaganda.
This allows all kinds of kookiness to pop up in society. QAnon. Pizzagate. Chemtrails. Because you can always find a squad of people who truly believe that stuff, and now pose as "media".
I don't know where we go from here. We are living in a world where debate can't even occur because people refuse to agree on actual FACTS, because they are trusting sources that repeatedly tell them that the facts are fiction. There is no transparency. There are no standards.
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms pretend that they are the media when it is convenient (they scream "you can't censor us, we're the media!"), but then they conveniently say they AREN'T the media when people call them out on the bullshit that appears on them ("hey, don't blame us, we're just the platform!").
In doing so, they are, in effect, violating those cardinal rule of media, which is "don't run a paid story as if it is news", and "don't print lies or gross misrepresentations".
So now we're left with a country that implicitly trusts anything published, particularly if it confirms what they tend to believe, and no mechanism to counter that. Some blog prints something zany, the New York Times could debunk it, but in doing so makes people more likely to believe the zaniniess as truth!
This allows large players, bad actors, and even foreign governments to manipulate our consciousness.
So while it may seem bad that media has become "more democratized", in reality, this just means that we now live in an ungoverned era of chaos in the media.
It's kind-of like the narrative of the Avengers movie - people come to think that the Avengers are bad because they fear their power, so they want them gone - allowing a truly evil power to come in unchecked, and unstopable.