In a free and open society, people "curate" their own news. But the left really seems to have jumped up on its "too much free information" bandwagon with unsurprising consequences. Lots of left-wing editorializing described as fact-checking.
And the next step after the fact check is employing that as a test to determine what even appears where.
Obama on Thursday decried America's "wild, wild west" media environment for allowing conspiracy theorists a broad platform and destroying a common basis for debate.
Recalling past days when three television channels delivered fact-based news that most people trusted, Obama said democracy require citizens to be able to sift through lies and distortions.
"We are going to have to rebuild within this wild-wild-west-of-information flow some sort of curating function that people agree to," Obama said at an innovation conference in Pittsburgh.
"There has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard, because they just don't have any basis in anything that's actually happening in the world," Obama added.
Officially it's not censorship. But who exactly is going to be doing the curating?
We've gotten a preview of that on Twitter where those on the left are empowered to do the censoring and those on the right get censored. What happens if this same model gets applied to Facebook, which it may already be to some degree, or to go Google News?