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Comment by wyattpeak | Hacker News Reader

Is that really the problem? When in history did people get their news and information from a large and diverse set of sources?

For as long as there's been national news, it's been dominated by a few headline sources. Before that there were lots of local sources, but nobody was reading the local news from both Connecticut and Colorado.

I don't know what the difference is today. Maybe there isn't a difference, we just prioritise modern problems over the same problems in ages past. But I really don't think the answer is a narrowing of sources, unless your point of comparison is something like fifteen years ago, for the small subset of the population who were mostly getting their news online at that point.

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"For as long as there's been national news, it's been dominated by a few headline sources. ... I don't know what the difference is today."

The difference is that a diverse, global set of individuals are becoming content creators, and a potentially global megaphone is being passed on to them.

Early on in the Internet's history it seemed that this emancipation of the individual voice from corporate and government control was going to be permanent, but governments and corporations have proven to be very adept at adapting and clawing their way back to positions of control.

And, in a twist that few expected, most individuals were happy to cede control back to governments and corporations for the sake of convenience and because they wanted to be protected from the speech of other individuals.

> When in history did people get their news and information from a large and diverse set of sources?

Lots of people get information from friends and family and their community directly.

Facebook is now mediating these private communications in DM, and censoring them. There are whole sites you simply cannot link to in DMs to your friends and family.

Can you give an example of such a site?

Twitter. Facebook censors certain links to tweets, even. That's not an example of a domain that is wholly banned, but it's a good example of the practice.

Huh? I very much doubt that fb block all twitter links, so can you be more specific?

Facebook in the last year or two was blocking the sending (in DM) of links to at least one (public) tweet by a family member of the US president.

Ah OK, so it's a specific tweet.

That's less concerning to me, as they've been doing that for a long time, for various reasons.

I mean, it's not like they blocked all links of a competing social network or anything \s.

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