Isn't facebook already bigger than some of the firms mentioned in the articles? Or is it not counted as media?
In this way, you could say that "Facebook Controls [a significant portion] of the Media in America"
A term like "media filter" only has value in distinguishing between "traditional" media and companies like Facebook. But, strictly speaking, Facebook is as much the media as traditional outlets and, in this context, those outlets are merely sources for Facebook.
With 2 billion viewers / readers / listeners.
That Facebook is a media channel?
That it doesn't in fact have 2 billion MUA, as claimed?
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/
That some other channel is more significant?
That there is another information channel to which a similar number of people dedicate 50 minutes of attention to daily?
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/business/facebook-bends-t...
"I don't think" is ... a rather weak level of substantiation.
Their primary differentiator in the US is that, unlike TV outlets, they're not really accountable to specific law. As we've seen in the last election, it's very likely groups used targeted Facebook ad buys to violate various state laws in the types and targeting of messaging they used (and before anyone gets their hackles raised, this is a quadpartisan phenomenon).
So yeah they funnel content but they have no editorial process.
Facebook will hit near $38 billion in sales this fiscal year.
So Google is a search-driven advertising company.
Facebook is a social-networking-driven advertising company.
This all depends on what % of revenue is ad-based.
The other tech giants, Apple and Microsoft (Oracle, Samsung, SAP, Huawei, …) actually make most of their money selling combos of hardware, software, and services.
Perhaps Amazon is unusual in that it's a web-retailer? I just checked and AWS[0] only accounts for 8% of their revenue as of Feb. of this year.
It looks like we won't have an end to data-slurping until we somehow invalidate the ad revenue model.
[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-web-services-posts-3-5b...
EDIT: Thanks njarboe for catching confusing typo