Would you have considered book publishers as "gate keepers" of information before the internet? What has changed?

I'd like to think the current situation is (at least partially) a byproduct of people creating their own echo chambers then never leaving them - before the internet, national communication was very limited since it required a lot of resources, so your local newspaper and library would need to cover news and topics without partisanship in order to sell to everyone in town. Now, you can specifically look for sources (even outside of actual news companies) and other people that have your same political views and limit communication to them, only looking at other circles and opposing viewpoints in order to criticize them out of context.

That makes sense and you make some really good points.

I have one idea (usually these ideas are fragile and blow up in my own mind, but bear with me).

What if anyone that posts something on social media requires x ratio of likes/dislikes (before spreading) from anonymous users from a truly random selection of people. What would the information landscape look like?

What if we self-censor through some small but liberal consensus - the ratio threshold is up for debate.

Book publishers are.... publishers. Youtube is not a publisher, at least they claim they aren't. Rules apply differently to publishers.

They are in an abstract sense, publishers. Whether they're legally or not, doesn't take away from the fact that they take information from an individual and broadcast it (print it on computer monitors) for public to consume. Just that the editorialization piece is missing.