Historically, the state and religion have been the institutions that control what people can and cannot say, punishing people for their thoughts, for their actions, and for their words. Silicon Valley companies have emerged as a third institution. They have put forth a new set of parameters. On their platforms, the people who make the decisions about our speech are not people that we elected, or that we trust for their faith, but people like Mark Zuckerberg. They surround themselves with “yes” people.
In the early days when Facebook was taking up this role, the rooms where decisions were made about what could and couldn’t be said were more diverse than I thought they would be, at least in terms of gender. But there was a lot less diversity in other ways. Most policymakers come from middle-to-upper-class backgrounds and many are Ivy League graduates.
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