Yeah, you're talking about gatekeeping the means of disseminating information, which is another way of saying that there are things should not be said. This is

Yeah, you're talking about gatekeeping the means of disseminating information, which is another way of saying that there are things should not be said. This is a fight as old as the species and completely unremarkable in that context. Regardless of the circumstances and however extenuating they are, this boils down to some perceived potential damage that some piece of information can do. It is a control issue and therefore also a trust issue (spoiler alert: every issue is a control and trust issue). And there's an interesting and ancient tool that can help us to reconcile (or at least more fully explore) any issues of control and trust in any context, and that tool is Stoicism. The old Stoics wrote tons and tons of shit exploring the boundaries of control, and the clear conclusion from all of this is that real control does not extend beyond the confines of your own mind. Everything else is an illusion. It follows from this that many trust issues are actually just different perversions of these ubiquitous illusions of control. The bad news is that we are all only human after all, and no amount of philosophy will ever overcome your baser impulses, and you will struggle with these issues as long as you are alive. The good news is that it does get easier -- a lot easier -- with practice, and by regularly questioning your assumptions and thinking. Why are you worried about people having access to tens of thousands of followers on Twitter? Because you think people cannot be trusted to think critically about what they read. Maybe that's true. I'm not prepared to say that this is or is not the case, because posts on Twitter or Facebook or HN are almost always serving more functions than mere data transfer (for example various kinds of social signaling). And these other functions, in addition to limitations of the medium itself, can result in a lot of signal error, from shaving off nuance to completely ignoring catastrophic contradictions. Internet posts are famously bad at conveying a person's thoughts, because we project so much of our own expectations onto the words we are reading, instead of giving the poster the benefit of the doubt and considering various interpretations of what they wrote. Incidentally, this is exactly why "fact-checking" (by gatekeeper hopefuls) is the new hot take by manufacturers of mass media products. All these people and groups of people trying to plug their own perspective, often while also trying to subvert messaging that doesn't support their particular worldview (or the worldview of their political allies). So in the end, the "right" answer to this is also the most challenging, most costly, most humbling, and most painful, but it's also the most empowering, most ethical, most just, most free, and most enduring: Encourage people to be critical thinkers that understand that we are all only human beings with an absolute limitation of control. The secret is that by studying it and constantly prodding it, we gain an intuitive understanding of that limitation of control, and we actually are harnessing the single most powerful force that any one individual could ever possess, which is that same control. Control over oneself and how we each respond to our duties of responsibility and accountability. And since we all share the same limitations of control, we understand those limitations as they apply to others, and it gets much easier not to fall into the traps set by illusions of control, like playing the blame game for example. Most people are not in control of themselves because they have almost no feel for the boundaries of control, and it is unreasonable to expect anyone to understand (let alone use effectively) anything they can't even see or feel and which is prone to falsehood.