I lean moderately left and I really disagree with #3. The explosion of voices is only ones that are "allowed". Twitter is one of the biggest offenders of cancel culture (i.e. silencing people).
1. Younger and left-leaning outrage tends to dominate on Twitter.
2. Older and right-leaning outrage tends to dominate on Facebook.
3. Any conclusions are going to be subjective AF accordingly, and HN is a more young and left-leaning cohort.
All social media is a double-edged sword, under the most charitable view.
The same people controlling the media once, are on the boards of the companies that allegedly made the change possible.
On the other hand, their faces are hidden now, so we can't really say if a certain topic is legitimately important for the general public or the consensus has been fabricated or, even worse, their platform has been abused and we won't know until it's too late because it's bad PR.
At least in the past I could almost be sure that a media outlet was not easy to infiltrate so their opinion reflected their beliefs and I could take a stance pro or against.
For example
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitte...
Now if I think Twitter has been corrupted by malevolent entities, I can't really do a lot about it, because I risk to.lose my voice too.
There aren't many other ways I can have the same exposure.
There's a completely different set of incentives at play.
Edit: re-reading this, I’m giving Twitter too much credit, but I hope the point I’m trying to make is still visible.
it depends on where and when
people with no voice are still with no voice, even with Twitter
people that had some kind of voice, still have a voice, probably more.
people with lots of voice power, still have a lot of power
except now people that have gained popularity don't want to lose it to silence potentially dangerous actors, because they are on the same boat, and entities with a lot of resources can have a voice (sometimes very convincing) where they wouldn't have before.
Think about the staggering amount of visibility the Talibans have on platforms like IG, they are influencers now!
Not entirely Twitter's fault, but the Jack Dorseys didn't think about the consequences and here we are.
They did what they are good at: built a platform, made it grow exponentially, lost control of it, but profited.
Not judging the intentions, they could have been the best ever, but the result is that they built something that we have to deal with, whether we like it or not.
Having a name and face didn't exactly help pre-social media, see Rush Limbaugh and the rise of dishonest & polarizing media post-fairness doctrine.
The media was just the media; they'd get put in their own box for analysis and skepticism.
Twitter's great power is controlling peoples' impression of what the people around them are thinking and saying. Or, rather, allowing various aggressive agenda-driven groups to control that.
So now the corps don't just control the voice of the media; they control the voice of your community too.