- For one when a news article is incorrect it is very easy to hold accountable the source of that information. How many people keep track of who said what on the internet?
- Fake Information takes more time to respond to than true information. False news travels 6 times faster (..) than truthful news [0].
- Media has a cycle of information that is way slower and more curated (even if manipulative) which allows true information to be heard louder.
- It's becoming easier and easier to fake image, video, and audio in a way never seen before [1].
- It's way easier for platforms like FB and Twitter and YT to make you spiral down a rabbit hole of similar content. Sure, this did happen in the past, but the current level of detailed recommendations makes it really easy for people to lose context inside their bubble.
- People are not machines, if they hear a message many times by different sources that trigger the right emotional responses they will believe it to be true. Now group every point and compound it by a lot of consumption and ingest it into monkey-like brains :)
[0]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/false-news-travels-6-ti...
This doesn't mean that power is being abused (though it gets increasingly hard to tell) but it's hard to call that kind of platform 'free'.
Sure you might be fairly certain that Facebook isn't limiting free speech right now, but the main reason you know this is through other channels. When their monopoly is complete there'd be no way to tell if speech truly is or isn't free.
And of course there's no way to tell if your posts are unpopular because of some well intentioned algorithm, or a more malicious algorithm. At the very least Facebook's incentives don't align with the rest of society.
And to the best of my knowledge there's still nothing preventing you from buying radio bandwidth. It's not really my area though so I could be wrong.
Fake-news and the like aren't mentioned in the article.