The issue is that currently public discourse happens on semi-public spaces. (Eg. Facebook, reddit, YouTube.) All slightly different mediums, different rules, di

The issue is that currently public discourse happens on semi-public spaces. (Eg. Facebook, reddit, YouTube.) All slightly different mediums, different rules, different communities (and meta-communities, and other aggregates and hierarchies and moderation/reporting systems). And the owners of these places want to extract profit from these places, they on one hand like the money, but they reasonably must police their places. Virtually millions of people can shout at the same time at the same place. Bullying, doxxing, harassment, SWATing, spam, scam, porn, gore, really fucked up ideologies, racism/xenophobia, and whatnot are cropping up. And it's clear that people are not really interested in going back to the typewriter and mailing letters to various publications. This large scale "politicing" is likely truly unprecedented. Bored and angry people can comment, like, upvote, downvote whatever anyone wrote/posted/created/asked. > Working in tech now is fraught with peril, especially if one says anything outside of the overton window. That's "fake news" - because the base rate is low, even if there are clear examples of it. (Eg Google firing Damore who pointed out that Google's diversity group/effort is very inefficient because it's unscientific, so inadvertently exposed it as a simple PR effort.)