I think we need to step back and look at who used to determine this. Up until the rise of the social web and the decline of legacy media that has paralleled it and is intimately related to it, we entrusted this window of acceptable discourse to a small number of legacy 20th century media institutions. This was itself a highly flawed system. It excluded a whole host of voices. It perpetuated an economic system, and arguably a political system, that benefited certain groups over others. In many ways it limited our discourse. We didn't hear from all the voices that we now have access to hearing.
When the social web emerged and new voices were given audience, we found that our debate, our public sphere, was actually much more diverse, much more dynamic, and much more informative than had been mitigated by that legacy media infrastructure. The problem now, I would argue, is that the terms of this public debate are not being defined by the value of individual voices, the societal benefit of those individual voices, or even the desired audience for those individual voices. We have a new structure that's determining what's acceptable. That structure is the filtering mechanism of platforms, deciding what we see and whether we are seen.
If we were concerned about that previous filtering model—the editors of major newspapers, the broadcasters, the small group of people who were determining what was acceptable—then we should now be concerned about the parallel filtering point, which is the algorithms and the business models that are determining what we see.