Gate keepers and invisible fences

I have been thinking about gates lately, and the people who keep them.

It worries me that our view today looks clear to the horizon, unfettered by fences or the people who manage them.

Because it isn’t.

We think we have direct access to the news because it shows up in our feeds. We read tweets, watch videos, see posts and feel informed.

Quotes trend, then they become memes. People share them because they take them for facts.

So often they aren’t.

Take for instance the viral story about how the 2025 Super Bowl champions declined their invitation to the White House, an insult so egregious it inspired one talk show host to tweet her foul outrage.

Naturally, her followers agreed and shared their rage all over social media. Except, the Eagles never declined that invitation because President Trump had not yet issued it.

All that outrage about something that never happened!

In light of all that’s going on in the world, this may seem like a trivial example. It isn’t. This is exactly how opinions get filtered into “facts” and rile up a populace.

We used to have obvious gatekeepers.

Source to consumer rolled through an educated assembly line — reporter to editor to publisher to newsprint to us, curated by people trained to be unbiased. A key pillar of our democracy, our fourth estate aimed to educate and inform. I’m not naive to the fallibility of human gatekeepers and the biases they bring to the table. But, the intent and the standards that drove them were clear.

Journalists felt so strongly about the purity of the news they intended to present, that advertising never appeared on the front page. Media companies need to make money too, though, and soon advertising didn’t just land boldly on the front page, it crept into the actual news hole and even into the stories themselves.

Then social media arrived, and Mark Zuckerberg called it the “Fifth Estate”.

“People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences,” he said in a 2019 speech to Georgetown University.

He was right about the consequences. I think we can all agree about that.

But the gatekeeping didn’t go away, it evolved. Instead of reporters and editors, we now have giant platforms and their requisite algorithms controlling what we see and say.

I just think it’s important that we understand that.

In his Georgetown speech, Zuckerberg touted the ability of platforms to decentralize power by “putting it directly into people’s hands.”

It does not seem to me, though, that power has been decentralized at all.

If we don’t understand who our gatekeepers are and what they’re peddling, we’re allowing ourselves to spiral further and further away from the truth and that’s where power lies.

We need to see the fences before we can get past them. We should fact check everything.

The sources are out there. It’s up to us to seek them out.