> That Facebook is maliciously and mostly singlehandedly responsible for the death of the newspaper and journalism.
The mistake here is in blaming Facebook in particular when it was really the internet in general.
Ironically what really happened here is basically the opposite of the premise. You used to have local media monopolies, or at least sufficiently concentrated local media markets that the players were making ad money hand over fist. Then they used some of that money to pay for local reporting.
The internet leveled the ad market. No longer did you need to buy advertising from the local Los Angeles media outlets to reach customers in Los Angeles. You could still buy it from them, but also Facebook, Google, Apple, a million independent blogs aggregated by third party ad networks, national media outlets that now allow you target adds to specific regions or demographics instead of having to buy nationwide ads etc.
It dramatically increased competition for ad space, which lowered prices and thereby grew the size of the market (Jevon's paradox) but made it so that the incumbents weren't making as much money as they used to because the price for a given amount of advertising fell as a result of increased competition.
> That "monopolism" is rampant and anti-democratic.
This is the part that's actually true. Democracy requires the free exchange of ideas. A handful of oligarchs deciding what people see is the opposite of that.
To give two examples from the recent election, there is some decent evidence that Twitter and Facebook suppressed a negative story about one of the candidates prior to the election as "Russian disinformation" even though it appears to be true, and there have been claims that social media sites showed voting reminders to users on a partisan basis, skewing voter turnout.
> it sure is an curious turn of phrase that there are "endless numbers of monopolists" in healthcare.
This is pretty obviously the case. Healthcare is not a single market, individual products in healthcare are. If you're diabetic you need insulin and can't substitute an SSRI. If you have severe allergies you need epinephrine and can't substitute acetaminophen.
It's frequently the case that the individual markets are controlled by one or two players, not just because of patents but also regulatory burdens that constrain new entrants etc.
> The thread of conversation implies that breaking up Facebook will somehow help, for example, the decline of the newspaper industry.
Breaking up Facebook et al could help the anti-democratic concentration of influence over the political discourse. A larger number of entities would reduce the influence of any one of them and increase the availability of a diversity of viewpoints.
It might even help local news reporting, if Facebook et al were sufficiently atomized, because smashing them into tiny pieces could mean that each city has one or more independent local Facebook which uses some of its revenues to fund local news reporting.