This is a great talk. I wrote the following response as comment when someone posted this video on Facebook:

I like what this guy is saying. However, he didn’t explicitly say that Google and Facebook are just doing what every company is intended to do: give people what they want. The better they can do that, the more they are supported by people using their product. The Google and Facebook are just doing what companies do. If people want mindless dribble, that’s what the companies deliver to satisfy their customers. // If Google and Facebook want to be more socially responsible, and give people more of what they “need”, they can choose to do so, but they don’t have to. // I think it’s a slippery slope to criticize people’s information diets and blame it on the content providers, who are just giving people what they want. Because: 1) it’s ultimately the consumers’ responsibility to control what they consume; and 2) telling content providers that they *ought* to provide information that the consumer isn’t looking for comes close to a justification for *forcing* the providers to run their business in a way they don’t choose. // The problem is not just that news has become narrowed and customized to people’s interests, it’s that people’s interests have become narrowed to exclude a lot of relevant information. // We can persuade people to be interested in a broader range of topics, or persuade the content providers to provide them. But telling content providers what they ought to provide will not change the fact that most consumers still aren’t asking for it.