Last time I went on X my feed which I curated from ML contributors and a few politicians had multiple white nationalist memes, and engagement slop. Fact checks frequently are added after millions of impressions.

I am sure there are very smart well meaning people working on it but it certainly doesn’t feel better than the BBC to me. At least I know that’s state media of the UK and when something is published I see the same article as other people.

> Facts are not checked in real time by a distributed vote

Nor could they be. We don't even have the tech for trustworthy electronic elections.

As I said, AI is better than social media. AI is trained on and references original sources, which makes it better than reading and believing random posts.

X is not a good representative to free speech.

1. It censors some topics. Just for fun, try to write something about Israel-Gaza, or try to praise Russia and compare the likes/views with your other posts and over the next week observe how these topics is impacting your overall reach even in other topics.

2. X amplifies your interests, which is not objectively true, so if you are interested in conspiracy or Middle East, it pushes you those topics, but others see different things. Although its showing you something you are interested in, in reality its isolating you in your bubble.

I think the press, as an institution, was at its peak post-Watergate, and pre- ... something. I don't know when exactly the press began to decay; possibly with the rise of 24-hour cable news in the 1990s; maybe the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, maybe the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The media landscape was certainly severely decayed by 2003, and has not gotten any better.

I really shouldn't be so gobsmacked by people's ignorance of history, but it is astounding to me the number of replies here that seem to believe that the press really was well-behaved in this time period. When learning about the Spanish-American War, pretty much the most important bullet point covered in history class is the role of the press in essentially inventing the cause of the war, as exemplified by the infamous quote from a newspaper baron: "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."

The general term to look up is "yellow journalism."

> * not too many super-rich / billionaires, who can just buy anything they want anytime, or ruin the careers of people going against them, hence people probably acted more freely.

The provided timespan encompasses the 'gilded age' era, which saw some ridiculous wealth accumulation. Like J.P. Morgan personally bailed out as the US Treasury at one point.

Much of antitrust law was implemented to prevent those sorts of robber baron business practices (explicitly targeting Rockefeller's Standard Oil), fairly successfully too. Until we more or less stopped enforcing them and now we're largely back where we started.

I think the 1876 election in the USA is an interesting case that counters this view.

I would disagree about capitalism being on the rise. Marx and his views grew after the 1850s and communist / socialist revolutions spread throughout Europe. There may have been more discussion of "capitalism" and an increase in industrialization, but "capital" had existed and operated for centuries before that. What changed was who owned the capital and how it was managed, specifically there has been a vast increase in central / government control.

I think this centralization of authority over capital is what has allowed for the power of lobbying, etc. A billionaire could previously only control his farms, tenant farmers, etc. Now their reach is international, and they can influence the taxing / spending the occurs across the entire economy.

Similarly, local communities were probably equally (likely far more) mislead by propaganda / lies. However, that influence tended to be more local and aligned with their own interests. The town paper may be full of lies, but the company that owned the town and the workers that lived there both wanted the town to succeed.

    if they publish anything contrarian