I agree that it's useful to compare the public-information environments (1) shortly after the widespread adoption of the printing press and (2) shortly after th

I agree that it's useful to compare the public-information environments (1) shortly after the widespread adoption of the printing press and (2) shortly after the widespread adoption of the internet. In the printing press example, what happened was that a hierarchy of trust developed. Publishing houses and periodicals in a wide variety of fields (science, news reporting, etc.) developed reputations for being trustworthy. Sometimes they abused that trust (or were simply mistaken), but as you note, in freer societies, these issues were corrected by other publications. At its best, this development of trust and accountability amounts to a society-wide conversation about what is true and what is useful. With the internet, we're at an inflection point in our society where we can decide at what level we want these trust hierarchies to exist, and how the conversation should develop. Should social media platforms be allowed to be an active participant in this conversation? There is a contingent (well-represented on HN) that says "no, social media should be forced to carry whatever speech its users post." (Though generally very few people say they should be forced to leave up spam or pornography, if they want to remove it.) I personally think that social media platforms should be allowed to participate in the society-level conversation by deciding what level of (what they deem to be) misinformation is allowed on their platform. When (not if) these platforms mess up, people will complain on other platforms (which still exist, despite protestrations to the contrary). To the extent that the largest platforms reject certain types of speech, it should be up to the proponents of those ideas to prove them out, and get society on board with their ideas. This is how things have worked in the past - small, upstart printing presses published pamphlets and try to disrupt the orthodoxy. If they can't, they fail. But... if we're going to have social media platforms (and not just the internet at large) serve as the public square (and thus force them to bow out of the larger debate on what is and is not misinformation), then we need to start having some real conversations about what sort of stuff the platforms must carry, and how we make those decisions. Presumably a government body would have to make decisions about what the platforms can't remove. How should that body be set up, and how should it make its decisions?