I am referring to the fact that back in the day communication used to be mediated by domestic, neutral carriers who got paid to carry communication neutrally regardless of source or content.

Nowadays, communication is primarily mediated by a handful of foreign companies that prioritize advertising revenue at all costs and will choose which media to carry and promote based on expected ad revenue. They are effectively acting as pseudo-press without the checks & balances and oversight that actual press is subject to.

> Please give an example of something social media gets away with that any other media would be punished for.

When’s the last time you saw an obvious scam advertised in a conventional print newspaper or magazine? Now check Facebook or YouTube ads. If such an ad made it through any reputable magazine heads will be rolling and they’d expose themselves to lawsuits, but social media keeps getting a pass.

Now, let’s say you’re a foreign threat actor and want to sway public opinion. You can’t just get in touch with the NYT/etc and ask them nicely. You’d need to buy and cultivate such influence over time and do so covertly because their people would get in trouble if there’s an obvious paper/money trail.

With Facebook? Create a page, make your propaganda video “engaging”, boost it with bot farms for the initial push and then Facebook will happily keep hosting and promoting your propaganda as long as its advertising revenue outweighs the costs of hosting it. That’s orders of magnitude cheaper than buying influence with traditional media.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trump-letter-to-no...

It would be if it were actually social - if the messages people saw were written by authors those people were interested in because of some kind of social relationship. But of course that's not really the case.

One problem here IMHO is that the meaning of terms like "press" and "media" has shifted significantly with modern Internet trends. Freedom of the press used to be an extension of freedom of speech. The principle was essentially the same but it acknowledged that some speech is organised and published to a wider audience. Neither has ever enjoyed absolute protection in law anywhere that I'm aware of because obviously they can come into conflict with other rights and freedoms we also think are important. But they have been traditionally regarded as the norm in Western society - something to be protected and not to be interfered with lightly.

But with freedom must come responsibility. The traditional press has always had the tabloids and the broadsheets or some similar distinction between highbrow and lowbrow content. But for the most part even the tabloids respected certain standards. What you published might be your spin but you honestly believed the facts in your piece were essentially true. If you made a mistake then you also published a retraction. If someone said they were speaking off the record then you didn't reveal the identity of your source. You didn't disclose things that were prohibited by a court order to protect someone involved in a trial from prejudice or from the trial itself collapsing. Sometimes the press crossed a line and sometimes it paid a very heavy price for it but mostly these "rules" were followed.

In the modern world of social media there are individuals with much larger audiences than any newspaper still in print but who don't necessarily respect those traditional standards at all and who can cause serious harm as a direct result. I don't see why there is any ethical or legal argument for giving them the same latitude that has been given to traditional media if they aren't keeping up their side of the traditional bargain in return. We have long had laws in areas like defamation and national security that do limit the freedom to say unfair or harmful things. Maybe it's time we applied the same standards to wilful misinformation where someone with a large audience makes claims that are clearly and objectively false that then lead to serious harm.