The important difference is that less than a billionth of what people communicate was through those newspapers. Nowadays? Maybe half is the the internet and most of that is through the big players (e.g. Facebook).
That's quite different to having a handful of internet giants, who seem to act similarly.
It's also different to having a huge Murdoch controlled network of media a firms.
Twitter is a US platform first and foremost. It doesn't make sense to compare the total number of Twitter users against the number of people on the entire planet. According to Statista:
> Social network Twitter is particularly popular in the United States, where as of January 2021, the microblogging service had audience reach of 69.3 million users
https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-...
That is about a quarter of the US population. Your 185/7900 figure is off by an order of magnitude.
I'm quite certain that's not true. Papers in the 1700s had just as much dominance in speech as social media does today.
https://csac.history.wisc.edu/document-collections/themes-of...
I think HN has a gross overestimation of twitter's influence. There are 7.9 Billion people on the planet, and 185 million daily active twitter users. I can't say I've ever once gotten my news from twitter and don't plan on ever starting. In my social circle I've got exactly 2 people who use twitter daily.