The Internet seemed to offer a promising alternative. The gates to the printing presses were trampled down by the public. Now anyone could publish anything they chose, in front of the whole world.

But the world will never know what you have to say if the techno-elites ignore you. Google, Twitter and Facebook could (if they wanted to) offer pure objectivity by using a dispassionate algorithm based on nothing but traffic numbers. Instead, all three have given the public excellent cause to believe they’re doing the opposite.

Twitter hired a panel of liberal standards enforcers and began bouncing nonconformists, such as the outspoken right-wing blogger Robert Stacy McCain. Google has stated it’s considering whether to slant search results to give more prominence to what it “judges” to be true — which is exactly what progressive newspaper editors say they’re doing.

If Facebook is really an open community, it shouldn’t have news curators at all, just a program that genuinely reflects what people are talking about.