But wouldn't it be better for everyone if those companies weren't in those unique positions? Can't your point about them not "screaming from the rooftops" about fake news be used to argue that we can't allow these companies to have such power when we know that they will only ever act in their own self interest?

Playing as devils advocate; does decentralization of that power actually improve the situation of dealing with manipulation from nation states? And if that's not what you're saying, is it a proposal that the government manages our news diet, or what do you view as the solution?

It would seem possible to me that if power was distributed widely over competitors it might be even harder to defend against, as fake news drives clicks which drives market share, everything about combatting fake news has been extremely polarizing (see this thread) and might drive bad PR to companies that take it seriously, a more diverse landscape might lead to a much more complicated regulatory landscape across competing products, and just a basic bystander effect of each executive team being more able to shirk responsibility because other people are too.

Decentralization would make it a little harder for the nation states to spread their messages, but you're right that it would probably make it much harder for us to stop them. I AM NOT and WILL NEVER BE proposing that the government manages our news diet. I guess I don't really have a solution to propose, and the point of my comment was more to suggest that we should try to change SOMETHING so that these companies don't have such great power, rather than let them continue and hope they don't (continue to) abuse that power.

If I could propose anything, it'd be that we stop letting outrage and clicks drive our political machine, but we all know that will never happen.

Yes, but it requires a populace that understands and acts on the risks from single sources of information.

A centralized source of power means a single target is all that is needed for manipulation to be effective. This is the basic premise behind decentralization in the first place.

Widely disturbed power is difficult to manipulate consistently without the manipulation becoming more easily visible, usually in the form of uncanny movement of many independent units as one, which most people can detect as suspicious.

I had never watched the leaked video so this was a good time to check it out and see what the Google leadership did say. The focus was not about fake news or anything close to a "unique positions to see how heavily Russia worked to influence our elections".

The topics they brought up were left vs right, democrat vs republican, Conservatism vs progressive, women vs men, white vs black, poor vs rich, Hillary vs Trump, immigration, trade policy, globalization, brexit, Hillary campaign points, polling data and the failure of accuracy in it. A bit about net neutrality, regulations and taxes.

Project Veritas video directly say that Google executive Jen Gennai want to influence the next US election. The leaked 'all-hands' video from the Google leadership show that their political position is internally stated as democrat. Combined it gives us a very strong implication that Google might try to influence the next election.

National elections would be better off with less outside influence, be that other nations or companies that holds so much power, money and influence to rival nations. It would be great if Google, Twitter, and Facebook worked on removing information bubbles, bots and trolls, but I would not cheer if they simply replaced Russia as a force that influence national elections all over the world.

Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, so yeah, that counts as Russian influence. He supported the candidate whose husband got paid in Russia, supposedly for a speech. This is Google.

Aside from that, Russians spending $100,000 in a presidential race that cost $2,000,000,000 is just 1-part-per-20000. It's less than Bill got for his speech. It's just 0.005% of the total. That could be the personal project of a sufficiently dedicated non-wealthy individual. It's lost in the noise.

"Google, Twitter, and Facebook were in unique positions to see how heavily Russia worked to influence our elections."

Wasn't that the main job of the FBI and CIA, two agencies with budgets that dwarf reason? These agencies' responsibilities are completely lacking from the public discourse.

Or maybe they never saw it because it didn't happen in the magnitude or significance that they all must now agree was definitely the case.