The primary progressive model for curing the perceived ills of social media – the failure to block harmful content – is to encourage or require social media platforms to act as gatekeepers. On this view, the institutional media, such as newspapers, radio, and television, historically ensured that the flow of information to citizens and consumers was "clean," meaning cleansed of falsehoods and malicious content. This in turn permitted a basic consensus to exist on facts and basic values, something essential for functional democracies. The rise of social media, however, destroyed the ability of institutional media to act as gatekeepers, and so, it is argued, it is incumbent on platforms to step into that role. This chapter argues that this is misguided. Traditional gatekeepers shared two key characteristics: scarcity and objectivity. Neither, however, characterizes the online world. And in any event, social media lack either the economic incentives or the expertise to be effective gatekeepers of information. Finally, and most fundamentally, the entire model of elite gatekeepers of knowledge is inconsistent with basic First Amendment principles and should be abandoned.

Floyd Abrams’ Foreword sets forth the premise of the book: that America has faced recurring episodes of censorship and that censors may be admired in their time, but that freedom of speech, as protected by the First Amendment, has flourished. For that reason, censors try to avoid being called censors.

Chapter 7 examines the mindset of Newton Minow, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman who summed up the regulator’s view of television by calling it a “vast wasteland.” Minow championed public interest regulation of the broadcast medium based on the theory that the electromagnetic spectrum is scarce and that the government must allocate broadcast licenses and regulate the content of programming.But the spectrum is no more scarce than any other economic good, and the events that led to federal control over broadcasting were contrived to extend government control over the medium. Minow and other like-minded regulators deny that this type of control is censorship, but their efforts caused diminished diversity in programming and dampened innovation. Further, the tenets of broadcast regulation were undermined as new technologies emerged, although that fact did not deter Minow and other like-minded regulators from advocating more government control. Since then, the law and the culture have moved on, rendering the positions that Minow espoused obsolete.

Benkler describes the results of a large-scale study of the political media ecosystem duringthe 2016 US presidential campaign and the first year of the Trump presidency. The majorfinding is that the American political media ecosystem is asymmetrically polarized, with aninsular, well-defined right wing, and the rest of the media ecosystem, from the center-right to the far left,forming a single media ecosystem anchored by traditional media organizations like the NewYork Times or the Washington Post. The structure renders the American right moresusceptible to propaganda and disinformation than the left. The chapter then offers ananalysis of why political economy, rather than technology, was the source of thisasymmetry, outlining the interactions between political culture, law and regulation, andcommunications technology that have underwritten the emergence of the propaganda feedbackloop in the right wing of the American media ecosystem, and outlines the structural driversof the present epistemic crisis.