Patrick Leigh Fermor recounting walking from Holland to Constantinople in the early 1930's is an enchanting tale. He was in his teens when he started the walk, but only started writing the travelogue when he was in his sixties. He was a fascinating and erudite character. The three books in the series are:
A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, The Broken Road (unfinished)
I get twitter RSS feeds. Find a users profile page and then use your client to search for feeds. It works with twitter lists too.
I use a browser extension called Feedbro. It is really neat because you can read twitter in reverse chronical order, without any of twitters feed optimisations.
This is a fascinating read and provides some insight into some of the influences on the origins of American democracy. One to read before you start the de Tocqueville.
But Facebook does regulate the feeds of their users by employing algorithms to surface content that they think the user will engage with, and so get bucks for the eyeball.
This distinguishes them from libraries, the only other similar platform for unmediated content. Libraries treat all information as equal and curates it as such. Facebook does not treat information equally, this means it is already moderating content.
Facebook already censors content that politicians deem unsavoury, so why should one political message get a free pass while another is removed?
Libraries have a featured books section or many of them do. Someone decides what is featured. If they are pro X they'll feature pro X books. Similarly they have limited space. Someone decide which books to take in and which books to throw out. Libraries have also banned books.
Sorry to be a little pedantic, but libraries do not treat all information as equal. There are far, far fewer books written by nazis in the library and most of them are by former high ranking members of the 3rd Reich so students and historians can research the Second World War and The Holocaust.
Even access is limited in some libraries for some information like technical libraries and books describing the manufacturing or design of dangerous materials.
I am not sure librarians are the ones who decide that a particular subject is socially or technologically dangerous.
The point still stands, the information that libraries provide is organised to an open standard defined by information science, not an opaque algorithm that is subject to the whims of its creators.
A quote from a peer reviewed paper by Shi Zhengli the 'Chinese Bat Lady' on how she combined SARS and HIV
"we investigated the receptor usage of the SL-CoV S by combining a human immunodeficiency virus-based pseudovirus system with cell lines expressing the ACE2 molecules of human, civet, or horseshoe bat"
A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water, The Broken Road (unfinished)