> In a society now dominated by reassuringly reductive tweets and memes, where supposedly learned people choose to boycott long-form podcasts, encourage publishers to ditch books by controversial authors, or lean on streaming providers to severe ties with comedians and other artists, this prediction from 1953 sounds eerily familiar.
Assuming this is the underlying thesis of the article, this is a simplistic view of information.
In real world, it's not always obvious how to distinguish "controversial" with "crackpot". With today's ease of publishing, there's plenty of information on every crackpot theory, which requires a practically impossible amount of research from the individual to systematically falsify. Some of them are harmless (flat earth), some of them are potentially dangerous (e.g. ivermectin).
Spread of potentially dangerous information is a lose-lose situation. If let spread, it will cause (on large enough scale) harm, if not, the popoluation will scream at censhorship.
The related link to a Don’t Look Up screenshot in the article page is actually very telling - in that movie, the audience knows for certain that the asteroid/comet will destroy earth. In reality, it's not so black and white, and doomsday theories are a dime a dozen.
Articles like this don't help at all to shape a cognitive approach to modern excess of information.