Truest statement of the week II

The Times and the Post have been at the forefront of the drive to censor the Internet. The Times continued its campaign in an op-ed by Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, published online yesterday. The column, “Russian trolls are only part of the problem,” openly admits that the effort to censor the Internet is not primarily about Russia.
Jankowicz writes that while it is “refreshing” that Facebook and Twitter “finally realized their culpability in the spread of online disinformation,” their solutions have concentrated “too heavily on removing Russian content while ignoring the problematic articles and posts created and shared by American outlets and users.”
She concludes: “If these tech giants want to contribute to democracy instead of help to tear it down, they need to recognize that homegrown threats to civil discourse exist among the very users to whom they are bequeathing more responsibility.”
The Times has become increasingly fearful in recent years that the growth of the Internet and smartphone technology has allowed millions to circumvent its control over what the population reads, shares and sees. Two-thirds of the American population now access some news on social media, according to a September 2017 poll by the Pew Research Center.

The mainstream media outlets have seen their readership drop precipitously over the last two decades, as their functioning as state propaganda outlets has led growing numbers of people to turn to alternative sources of information. According to an annual Gallup poll, the proportion of Americans who trust the media to “report the news fully, accurately and fairly” fell to 32 percent in 2016, the lowest level since Gallup began asking the question annually in 1997. This compares to 76 percent who answered in the affirmative in 1976.

-- Will Morrow, "New York Times cashes in on Facebook’s news censorship" (WSWS).