It's remarkable that the emerging consensus is that Google, FB, and Twitter already have such excessive power over the public discourse that we must ... urgently give them even more power to decide of their own discretion who and what gets to be excluded from that discourse.
What's remarkable is not that the idea is out there, but how it's so widely taken as astonishing that private companies -- who have no obligation to provide recourse of appeal for their decisions -- haven't already taken it upon themselves to serve as arbiters of public speech.
Re which you really must read @adamjwhitedc on why "the pressure for Google to adopt ever more expansive interpretations of “exploitative,” “authoritative,” and “what people are looking for” will doubtless rise": thenewatlantis.com/publications/g…
The pulling of @DGreenbaum's BI column is a useful example. I've seen lots of "lmao it's just an op-ed, why give it so much power" replies to this reposting of it.
But... what do you expect to happen? That's the irony of how these things usually go: Someone protests that X piece or idea is outside the bounds of allowable discourse, it gets pulled, and that gives it more attention and power than it would have otherwise had.
And if you protest that Facebook, Google, and Twitter aren't media companies -- well, that's precisely what the loud insistence that they take on this role is asking them to be.
And as such they will have vastly more power than any other media company out there. Everyone clamoring for this thinks it's a supply problem, but it's a demand problem, and the solution they want will make it worse.
This is better stated than I put it:
