[rainforest]

Perhaps you don't have a change in the number of crackpots, but you have a decent chance the crackpots are now all saying the same thing. Misled voters in a democracy seems like a bad thing to me (this extends to the way mass media is currently used of course).

There's an obvious slippery slope in these discussions - ultimately it's reducible to who you give the right to vote to, and discomfort about measures to keep the undesirables from rallying ought not to be ignored.

[sneak]

It seems to me that mass media has always been under the control of a small group of people; I believe that the current narrative that unrestricted, uncensored mass media is dangerous/an existential threat stems from the fact that digital communications systems stand to threaten that bottleneck, if properly deployed.

It strikes me that this is why Facebook et al are so eager to censor; otherwise an attempt will be made to destroy them, as they provide a bypass around centralized mass media narrative control.

Narratives are how the world is practically governed. The ability to propagate a narrative to millions of people is a power on par with a standing army.

[farias0]

The fact that mass media profits with curated information does not imply that "uncensored mass media", as you put it, has had a positive impact.

It has become apparent that the "uncensored mass media" can be controlled through money, ie. politicians steering the narrative on social media using disinformation campaigns. But now they are hidden behind millions of small agents that are so hard to fact check, hold accountable and prove the liason to said politician. With mass media big companies were in this sense vulnerable -- to 3rd parties attacks, to the legal system, to the public.

I'm hardly a fan of big corporations, but in the current state of affairs the common individual is helpless, drowned in a sea of noise à là Brave New World, and for the powerful chaos is indeed a ladder.