[rodgerd]

> The fact of the matter is, the Googles and the Facebooks and the Reddits of the world hold a tremendous and frightening amount of control over public discourse and public opinion.

They're not even as powerful as the editor of one of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, never mind the man himself.

[pessimizer]

I never read any articles from Murdoch's newspapers unless they're surfaced to me by one of those services. Do you buy a Murdoch paper, or do you get a link on Google News, your Facebook feed, or your favorite Reddit subs? I'm pretty sure I'm a 90% case, not unique.

Of course, it's all just rich people controlling the discourse. Murdoch can buy pieces of Google, Facebook, and Reddit too.

Now, they just get to micromanage it. Micro-censorship, Micro-surveillance.

[rodgerd]

> I'm pretty sure I'm a 90% case,

I think you're in a profound bubble if you don't imagine Murdoch has vastly more control over public discourse than Google.

[Karunamon]

Gonna disagree with you there. It's the same kind of power, just with a different (sometimes overlapping) set of demographics. Facebook is one of the most used websites in the entire world. Just the simple act of hiding one story to promote another one changes what millions upon millions of people will see and talk about.