The previous platform for newspapers was public in nature.<p>These new social media platforms have consolidated and are managed by a few private corporations.<p>As a private company, like a private individual, they have every right to decide what should or shouldn&#x27;t be hanging on their walls, so to speak.<p>Standing on a corner and selling a political pamphlet, journal or newspaper is the foundation of the fourth estate. This happened on public streets and sidewalks, not in pseudo-public spaces like today&#x27;s shopping malls or corporate-owned courtyards. It came with publicly sanctioned protections for the right to do so.<p>If the old media are dying off to be replaced by these new forms that are digital and self-published in nature, we need to have a very serious conversation about the dangers of these pseudo-public spaces like Facebook and Twitter, who get to decide not only how but which people see what is published.<p>Unrelated, but perhaps the dangers of direct democracy are present in the advent of direct media, in a way that would have been unpredictable to those who set up the original checks and balances.<p>Should we try to come up with better public platforms for publishing that take some of these issues in to consideration?