Ok, but can you please stop posting unsubstantive comments, and please not use HN primarily for political battle? We're trying to avoid those things here.
Powerful people will still be held in check by public opinion, market forces, and other powerful people. We don't need a centralized MiniTrue gatekeeping with its own agenda.
> Powerful people will still be held in check by public opinion, market forces, and other powerful people. We don't need a centralized MiniTrue gatekeeping with its own agenda.
Actually, in the absence of the professional journalism, they'll be "held in check" by things like QAnon and "Stop the Steal," fueled by things like partisan talk radio.
The media isn't a "centralized MiniTrue" (I mean that's obvious), it's just industry where people with the profession of gathering and disseminating information work. It's taken time to develop professional standards, and if it's destroyed, the main thing that would be destroyed are those standards.
"When the full flowering of the social media age turns even the most prestigious paper into just another midsize Facebook page struggling to catch up to the reach of Dan Bongino?"
Good. That's a source of our strength. And It's not going to stop.
Any media company is just another corporation with self-interest that doesn't align with the public good.
It happens all the time. Possibly a majority of all twitter bans over the last 5 years fit that description. Say racist thing like "Muslims should stay out of the USA" get banned by twitter for "inciting violence against a protected group".
In a way, all political advocacy consists of incitement of violence. Any law not ultimately backed up by the credible threat of violence is just a suggestion. If you don't pay your taxes for long enough, eventually federal agents with guns will come to take you to jail, and if you resist, they'll kill you.
