What this is about is the model created with the meat packing industry during the period of Upton Sinclair's muckraking journalism, I think in the 1920s. Many new regulations were instituted, which ran all the small competition out of business. Similarly, Zuck has asked for new regs from the federal government, because he knows it will devastate independent media. Only giants like FB, Twitter, Google and YT can afford the army of employees and tech infrastructure it will take to satisfy the regulations' requirements. Like splitting up the Rockefeller empire, it's a "heads they win, tails you lose" scenario.

ZH Article by Tyler Durden

Though readers of the mainstream press probably aren't aware, Facebook's post-election crackdown on conservative-leaning media has made it very difficult for some of these companies to connect with their audience on Zuck's platform (which, with more than 2 billion members, is the largest of its kind in the world). After being accused of rigging the election by failing to stop an army of fake accounts from buying advertising (who spent a whopping <$500,000 on the Facebook targeted ads campaign), Zuck has felt the brunt of partisan attacks from progressives who believe that no matter matter what the company does, anything short of banning conservative media outlets outright means it likely won't fulfill its new, unwarranted mandate of innoculating fragile Western democracy from Facebook (the company's decision to ban Zero Hedge twice within the past year was declared 'a mistake').

So it is that on Thursday, following reports about his meetings with conservative leaders that provoked howls of rage among his liberal critics, the all-powerful CEO participated in a 'conversation' on freedom of expression at Georgetown, where he took questions from real-life G-Town students. Facebook has also provoked the rage of Congressional Democrats by defending FB's decision to run an error-filled Trump campaign ad. 

The event corresponded with the publication of an interview with the Washington Post, a paper that's owned by Zuck's Silicon Valley tech billionaire rival Jeff Bezos, where Zuck declared that, though he fears "the erosion of truth", he remains uncomfortable being tasked with the job of official censor on one of the world's largest platforms for interpersonal communication. By running her own ad filled with ridiculous falsehoods and exaggerations, Elizabeth Warren recently mocked the company for opting to run a Trump campaign ad filled with errors.

"People worry, and I worry deeply, too, about an erosion of truth," Zuckerberg told The Washington Post ahead of a speech Thursday at Georgetown University.

"At the same time, I don’t think people want to live in a world where you can only say things that tech companies decide are 100 percent true. And I think that those tensions are something we have to live with."........................