The power of technology platforms has been recognised for a few years now, with governments, media, companies and people of all types struggling to influence the hearts and minds of their fellow human beings for the sake of making money, getting and/or keeping power, destroying nations, spreading sexual and religious agendas and meeting many other goals of which these are only a part.
Before the internet, there were very few people with access to hearts and minds on a large scale. Governments and politicians had this access due the money, networks, media and other resources they had access to and religious institutions had their adherents and employees, for example Catholic priests and Muslim faithful.
As a natural result, religious institutions had cross-border access to hearts and minds well before governments could consolidate their power locally. This is probably a reason why the Chinese have always been hostile to the Muslims living among them; at the end of the day, a man with a religious compass cannot be controlled and can count on help from more of his fellows who might end up overpowering them.
With the internet and the creation of internet platforms, this acces to hearts and minds has been thrown wide open and now anybody has access to influence over eight billion people.
Politicians are naturally jealous of this power while governments are understandably afraid of it because their "enemies" can hit them harder and faster than they have the willingness and/or ability to respond to. This can be exemplified in the fall of governments across the world from the West to the East.
The natural reaction of governments to the power these platforms wield is to interfere and regulate them and enter their operations, leading to various conflicts over things like human rights and free speech.
While there are obvious issues in this whole debate, I would like to point to my view that these platforms are built to be tools.
Tools are created to serve a purpose, like knives for cutting meat and kales, or hammers for beating stones and nails. Their original purpose or intention of creation does not however prevent human beings from doing with them whatever they want. The creator of electric motors definitely did not envision their use in making vibrators, neither did the makers of high-wuality cheap Chinese knives envision their use in cutting off the phalli and balls of men in central Kenya.
While, yes, it is necessary to protect people from bad things like drugs and incitement to mass murder, it is also important to understand the fact that we humans are generally a bad lot.
Furthermore, the governments, middle-class and media, generally the loudest groups among us about regulations of these platforms, are culpable themselves of egregious crimes like the mass murder of their own citizens through promotion of things like abortion and genetically-modified crops and issues like hormones and sex change surgeries for children(!) confused about their identities.
We focus so much on the platforms and regulation of human behaviour that we forget that, in general, people will do whatever it is they want to do wherever it is they want to do it and there is generally little we can do or say about it.