If Google, FB, Twitter are 'public spheres', they cannot censor content too

The number of US Facebook users was 240 million in 2019, more than 72% of the population

When talking among themselves, Silicon Valley big shots sometimes say weird things. In an internal presentation in March 2018, Google executives were asked to imagine their company acting as a “Good Censor,” in order to limit the impact of users “behaving badly.”

In a 2016 internal video, Nick Foster, Google’s head of design, envisioned a “goal-driven ledger” of all users’ data, endowed with its own “volition or purpose,” which would nudge us to take decisions (say, about shopping or travel) that would “reflect Google’s values as an organization.”

If that doesn’t strike you as weird — like dialogue from some