There is a lot of speech on Twitter and Facebook, but the purpose of those companies is profit. If they could curate and filter content to increase revenue, they will. Plus, telecom laws protect them from liable so they can get away with publishing outright lies.

The fact that people use these poorly vetted sites as their primary source of news is unsettling. There is a lot of quality content, but it’s surrounded by a lot of garbage (from both the left and the right).

The NYT and WSJ both operate by much higher standards than I’ve ever seen on FB or Twitter. The newspapers are far from perfect, but they do abide by ethical standards. And most importantly, they are liable for their content.

And yet the purpose of the NYT and WSJ is also profit. They also publish a lot of total dreck.

You are chasing after a distinction without a difference.

Right, but you don't expect NYT or WSJ to be required to print every "letter to the editor" submitted by anyone in the world. They are for-profit, non-government, and they print what they want. Twitter is also for-profit and not the government – so why is it different if they also choose not to broadcast some things?

Newspapers and TV media also have always received a lot of government pressure trying to spin their coverage or convince them to downplay (or emphasize) certain stories. I'm still confused about why it's suddenly so much more scandalous that anything similar happened with Twitter.

> I'm still confused about why it's suddenly so much more scandalous that anything similar happened with Twitter.

It's obviously bad in both cases, and it's clear that this kind of behavior has actually increased the attraction of misinformation and decreased trust in mainstream media -- which is the opposite of the intended result.