Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are social media platforms. They may be the primary mechanism by which the media’s products (articles, videos, podcasts) are shared, but they are not the media.

The biggest loss to society from this change arises from how the billions of dollars of revenue from advertising is spent.

Old media used to plough the money into investigative journalism and local news. New media doesn't do that, which is why our current crop of "leaders" in politics are drawn from celebrity culture and thrive on ignorance.

Which is why they "moderate the content on the platform", right? People get banned for posting their political opinions but media companies

They moderate their content because if they don't, an angry mob will demand that companies pull ads from the platforms. Ironically, by prioritizing revenue over an agenda, it's actually the most democratic form of censorship.

Censorship based on how much money different groups spend and gets outraged is not very democratic compared to censorship based on democratic votes. And censorship based on democratic votes is seen as bad, what big corps do now is even worse.

Consider that social media figures and podcasts hosts use the authority of corporate media to push narratives or validate their own narratives to their audience.

Corporate media sets the agenda or talking point of the day in a way that people then go on to discuss these talking points on podcasts and social media.

When considering situations that require “access” like daily press conferences with political figures ask yourself how many of those asking questions are independent reporters vs corporate media.

While social media does influence corporate media normally it’s just filler content or celebrity gossip that ends up getting talked about in traditional media.

I guess to summarise most people are getting their news from these six corporations either first hand or second hand via social media/podcasts.

Think of it as institutional media that other institutions pay attention to.

Sure CNN and MSNBC viewing numbers might not be as high as PewDiePie, but the type of people that watch it will be more valuable to influence.