We can have democracy or we can have Facebook

There are some serious limitations on that approach.

We have limited time to devote to going into an issue in any depth. We can maybe handle thoughtfully evaluating all sides for one or two issues if we are getting honest information from all sides.

When you have one or more sides deliberately trying to mislead, they have a huge advantage. First, since they aren't burdened by the need to actually be correct, they can generate a wider variety of arguments and do so in greater quantity than those who are arguing in good faith.

Second, we have a variety of built in cognitive biases. The people trying to mislead can purposefully craft their arguments to hit those, increasing the chances we'll believe them.

On top of all that, social media's algorithms for determining what to show us are trying to maximize engagement, and the things that most engage us are the things that fit in with our cognitive biases. They have a huge amount of behavioral data on us, which has made them very good at picking out and prioritizing stuff on our individualized feeds that will hit those biases.

You can't really think for yourself without high quality information, and because they are based on maximizing getting your attention social media tends to mostly show you low quality information. In short, the way social media sites like Facebook are designed makes it nearly impossible to get accurate information from them no matter how much you try to think for yourself.

There was a recent article in Scientific American covering research into this, "Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It" [1]. HN discussion of that article [2].

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-overl...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25153716

https://www.politifact.com/article/2017/oct/02/difference-be...

This doesn't mean that power is being abused (though it gets increasingly hard to tell) but it's hard to call that kind of platform 'free'.

Sure you might be fairly certain that Facebook isn't limiting free speech right now, but the main reason you know this is through other channels. When their monopoly is complete there'd be no way to tell if speech truly is or isn't free.

And of course there's no way to tell if your posts are unpopular because of some well intentioned algorithm, or a more malicious algorithm. At the very least Facebook's incentives don't align with the rest of society.

In the 1990s in the US, before the internet took off, most people had access to one local paper (two in some cases), maybe an a few local magazines (include “alternative weekly” newspapers), a few local TV and radio stations, PBS and NPR, the 100 or so cable channels their local provider offered, the hundred or so magazines and newspapers the local Borders or Barnes & Noble sold, and whatever magazines and newspapers their library had in the periodicals section. And a lot of this media was owned by a few big corporations like Time Warner, News Corp, Condé Nast, etc.

> versus when you have just one, and that one actively works to prevent other options from emerging.

How has Facebook tried to prevent news outlets from emerging? They benefit hugely from news outlets, and kind of even depend on them for existence. They need the content for people to post and share. New publications like Vox probably owe some of their success to Facebook, and vice versa.

FB might have a lot of power to amplify traffic to certain publications (kind of like the big retail chains did in the 90s only more so), but that’s very different from actively preventing new news outlets from emerging.

And to the best of my knowledge there's still nothing preventing you from buying radio bandwidth. It's not really my area though so I could be wrong.