A reporter for the New York Post linked to her own published news story on Facebook. Many of her readers also posted links to the story on their Facebook status.

Facebook deleted the posts.

Facebook and Twitter have appointed themselves as dictators who control what you shall see online. Both use algorithms to select what content you see in your news feed – you do not see every post from your friends, for example, but only posts that Facebook thinks you want to see. You do not even see posts in chronological order.

An alternative approach would be to give each user access to content controls – let the user select what they see and how they see it. Users might select “curated” or “filtered” content, or “chronological order” content. Users might choose to down rank or up rank specific friends to affect how filters work. The basic idea would be to let the users decide how they want information presented.

But that is not what Facebook and Twitter do. They both control the horizontal and the vertical (alluding to the old TV show “Twilight Zone”). And the result is that both act as information censors along the lines of those described in George Orwell’s “1984”.