I could not agree more. These companies who use algorithms to choose what user content to display should be held to the same standard as a publisher where a hum

I could not agree more. These companies who use algorithms to choose what user content to display should be held to the same standard as a publisher where a human chooses what letters to the editor to print in the newspaper. Fools think of social media as similar to a telephone and thus just a neutral platform, because you can communicate with each other. For hypothetical social media without an algorithmic feed (like Facebook at its inception, or phpbb forums, or IRC or Slack or email etc) this would be true. But modern social media does not just neutrally show what has been posted without favor to any. It is a machine that is carefully built by a large team to choose the posts that will most optimize the company's goals (mainly profit). Thus it's much more like a print newspaper's letter to the editors section, because out of a large number of submitted user posts, the company (using their algorithms to save themselves labor costs) they choose just a few to promote highly. Fundamentally, algorithmic recommendation is speech and endorsement by the algorithm operator, and if they have a problem with that, they can always put a human in the loop. It is crazy (and represents huge wealth transfer from society to these companies-- and moreover from the poorer to the richer) that they get away with having less responsiblity for doing something just because they automated it. By the same logic, it's bad for me to shoot people with a gun but becomes fine as long as it's not me doing it, but some Rube Goldberg contraption that automatically fires at people near my house. By the same logic, it may be illegal to knowingly sell cigarettes to minors, but you can just make a vending machine with no access control and then it's fine. Absolutely insane that they get away with less responsibility despite making the same editorial decisions, with the same benefits accruing to themselves, as a traditional publisher that picks and chooses what to display. And our whole society has absorbed this stupid paradigm. You hear people conflating the right to free speech with the right to have your speech amplified above other speech, which obviously makes no sense since it's a zero sum game. But you have people pretending the algorithms are invisible natural things. By the way, I am pessimistic. We are in too deep. An entire generation of school children is being raised on this stuff, and has been for almost a decade, creating a deep generational cycle of dependence. And ad tech has taken over the S&P500, making the wealthy elite dependent on the profits. It's just far too valuable a means of social control for it to just be given up without some countervailing force to incentivize it.