> There are massive and obvious dangers in letting Google, Facebook, Twitter decree for millions/billions of people what counts as "science" or "misinformation"

> There are massive and obvious dangers in letting Google, Facebook, Twitter decree for millions/billions of people what counts as "science" or "misinformation", and they've already demonstrated getting it spectacularly wrong. It's vital to a free society to have a culture of open debate, and these platforms are now our media for such debate. I'm highly concerned about BigTech regulating the speech of others particularly when the others are experts in their respective fields, and BigTech has none, but is merely parroting an authoritarian government perspective. When we normally debate a view, people present data from opposing viewpoints and we sort it out over time. Sides present data. Sides explain relevancy and over time, we determine greater accuracy. That cannot happen in an environment where gatekeepers control the speech and dictate the tone and content of it. > Without getting into rightness or wrongness of views, I think it's factually the case that those pressures are coming from a fairly narrow band of political opinion which is far from being the entire spectrum and excludes many mainstream views, so in that sense what we're seeing is something analogous to "regulatory capture" of the big platforms. This gives enormous leverage to one cluster of political opinions over all the others. It's a distorting factor which I think is against the public interest (even though I personally agree with some of their views). > We need debate and persuasion, not hard use of power. This understanding was commonplace, in fact bedrock, for so long that many of us are shocked at how quickly it could be abandoned, and not just abandoned or even forgotten but replaced with a narrative in which it was never that way to begin with! I think this is very well written, and can be related to much of the modern authoritarian use of power, of compulsion, by BigTech in cahoots with government.