coming up on this episode of The Round Table.

You have these large platforms that control a large piece

of the public deliberation, or at least the venue

in which lots of public deliberation

and sharing of information goes on.

And this participation rate has climbed

as people have lost confidence in mainstream media outlets

as in turn the mainstream media,

or really the media environment in general has gone,

has disaggregated and decentralized and all the rest.

So we're all left swimming in this sea of information

and what was hailed as wonderful revolutionary

and the beginning of a new age of golden democracy

when it helped elect Obama.

This is the thing we said over and over again,

it was then said to be a terrible thing.

The greatest threat to democracy, et cetera,

when it empowered Trump.

And so I think thoughtful citizens need to consider seriously

the extent to which large international companies

who can throttle, control, manipulate the flow of information,

especially in free republics or putatively free republics

...