BigTech has created something that's never existed before. Perhaps the best phrase is it is an "Epistemological Monopoly"

If you run a newspaper, you publish lots of letters from nuts and cranks. You run stories on some of the things they do. People love hearing about other colorful people in their community (as long as they're peaceful, of course) When you run news stories, the general idea is that you have an editorial staff which is either balanced politically and temperamentally or is able to fake being so, the goal being to cut off and prevent any appearance of the publication accidentally slanting news when there's a much better and generally-accepted way of telling it. If it's passionate, stick that shit in the editorial section where it belongs.

But there's no longer that distinction between news, quirky folks, and slice-of-life stories. In fact, the more that it's all muddled up, the more eyeballs you can reach. It's even become it's own anti-joke. I doubt many of the flat-earthers are actually serious, but it's a way to be wacky that the internet overlords overlook.

And there lies the rub. If you control the gateway to information for billions of people, you effectively control where they go online. And since you control where they go online, you control what they know. These things logically follow one another. If they didn't, so many billions of dollars wouldn't be invested in internet advertising every week. We control what you know and when you know it. Driving through town? Hey, did you know there's a great pizza restaurant a block away? Computers are our brain, and internet companies are making huge bank on knowing stuff for us and telling us what would be fun to do.

So if they don't like an idea, think it's dangerous, not only does it leave their platform, it ceases to exist for most people. In the physical world it may exist, but in the minds of the world it does not.

That is immensely fucked up. The only thing worse would be subtle algorithms that do the same thing but are black boxes and difficult to prove exist or how they work. At least in this instance we're all having an honest conversation about it.

I could make a long, long list of information everybody knew was dangerous that we would have happily shut down if we could: germ theory, heliocentric solar system, bacteria causing ulcers, and so on. I could make an equally-long list of information everybody knew was true and good for folks that we later abandoned: phrenology, Social Darwinism, Eugenics, homosexuality being deviance, etc. Hell, just look at how many times everybody that's serious have flipped around on issues during the pandemic. That's how it's supposed to work. At one point, we had ER physicians secretly going behind the backs of their hospitals to share information. This was both breaking their contracts and could have caused great harm to themselves, their patients, and the institutions they worked for.

Now these problems are solved. Ideas contrary to leading opinions just cease to exist, and ideas supported by leading opinion, mixed with a lot of heavy-handed emotion and hyperbole, get stuck at the top of your feed.

We don't fight you over wrongthink anymore. We don't stick you in the editorial section or write articles praising you for your creativity even if most of us disagree. You and your ideas just cease to exist as meaningful concepts; no mentioning, no chatting, no links, sometimes even no association with people who feel that way. We have certainly done a great job of fixing that pesky "How do we keep the most people using our service" problem. Congrats guys.