Here's why Twitter/Facebook/other platforms are publishers.…

Neither do electricity nor phone companies (usually) deliver advertising based on the curation of content and vice versa. Neither do they as companies foster discussion. Etc etc.

In fact, this goes back to a basic confusion. Not even the web is the same as the internet, and social media is certainly not the internet. Neither are apps or platforms. The utility, if there is one, is the internet, the rest is increasingly some equivalent to publishers.

this is before you get to 1 the over-fetishization of content/representations and 2 the out of date characterisation of both media in general and the divisions within it on all sides, based on a media "age" that's now perhaps passing

per McLuhan but also Whitehead, Langer maybe, a lot of media ecology, Lovelace, Deleuze, Hopper, Virilio, Harney, and many many more.

media distribution from books, printing to social media, largely limited to content/representations so thinking, operations, have been funneled through these > then largely non-media tech, people, bodies, etc (now changing in all kinds of ways, only which of which "automation")

...operations seemed, for hundreds of years, subservient to representations/content >> cognitivism, representational democracy, etc etc

also led to a series of practices and division within media (including content, publishers, utilities etc etc) that are both flourishing as never before (a kind of "decadence") and also outmoded, being overtaken by other things media can do, and new functions within older media

Yet now media can operate way more outside of the limits of representation and content. The latter still important but reduced to lower level secondary/tertiary whatever participants, often functions under/in the service of direct media operations within, on and often as world.

e.g. drones, genetics, VR even as intervention in the basics of perception and action, ai, data, algorithms, automation, etc etc)

very different situation vis a vis media and everything it involves ...

so one thing this means is that when people talk media literacy they often mean about the nature of content/representation and truth etc. Important but secondary to what a lot of contemporary media scholars and others involved are working on (not to mention reactionary forces).

not that this means the problems with representation and so forth go away. On the contrary. But to these we also have to add the like of configuration and e.g. the never appropriate but now less so basis of configuration according to eg neurotypical understandings of comms etc.

Here's why Twitter/Facebook/other platforms are publishers. Neither electricity nor phone companies actively curate content, that, is, choose what content will go where and why (like a newspaper, that is, a publisher). Just cause algorithms are involved not really a difference.

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