It's wrong to frame this topic as being about wanting "the censorship weapon" or not, when we're mostly talking about centralized tech companies boosting this tripe to "drive engagement" - the role of the censor is already being actively played by these companies! When Aunt Mildred had to click 'forward', choose the list of people she was going to bombard with her spam, left the subject line containing FwReFwFwFw, and then the sheer majority didn't even reply, those were all natural limiting factors. Now Faceboot takes mere reading as a positive act of "engagement", shows it to people it predicts will be receptive, and then concentrates activity between them creating an illusion of social proof.
This ties right into your desire for tools, because tech companies don't actually want people using independent tools to access their systems. They're already giving us the tools they want us to use - poor ones designed around slowing us down, confusing our unadorned human brains, and creating a slow drip of partial accomplishment rather than letting us complete a task and move on. Attempts to even augment their tools with things like Adblock are met with a lot of grumbling and sometimes even outright blocking. Full blown third party clients (eg yt-dlp) are continually seen as a fringe thing, and churn between names/maintainers/hosts due to legal shakedowns. The nonsense of prior-restrained-based "API keys" runs roughshod over developers' thought processes. A sustainable ecosystem of independent third party clients in the mainstream app stores is essentially impossible - a wink, nod, and specious reference to trademark, DMCA, or CFAA is all it takes to get the other tech gatekeepers to collude.
Unfortunately, this all points to the only way we're fixing any of this is some kind of regulation. The centralized tech companies have set up their positions at a Schelling point of individual agency, and have heartily grown into the power vacuum. Like atoms in a gas, it's impossible for us to all just individually move in the same direction at the same time, and so the only way to get a lever big enough to move them is collective action via the government, as imperfect as that is.
Personally I'm in favor of antitrust enforcement that breaks up this bundling between hosting and client software (and hardware devices as well). They should be considered separate products, when developed at the same company be completely independent business units, with backroom communication (eg unpublished APIs) prohibited. I'd say this would get us 80% of the way there to having the choice of tools that don't themselves encourage the spreading of disinformation. Then additional functionality of automated filtering etc could grow organically on top of that, in a user-representing way. But for any of that to happen, the client ecosystems have to be freed first.
This ties right into your desire for tools, because tech companies don't actually want people using independent tools to access their systems. They're already giving us the tools they want us to use - poor ones designed around slowing us down, confusing our unadorned human brains, and creating a slow drip of partial accomplishment rather than letting us complete a task and move on. Attempts to even augment their tools with things like Adblock are met with a lot of grumbling and sometimes even outright blocking. Full blown third party clients (eg yt-dlp) are continually seen as a fringe thing, and churn between names/maintainers/hosts due to legal shakedowns. The nonsense of prior-restrained-based "API keys" runs roughshod over developers' thought processes. A sustainable ecosystem of independent third party clients in the mainstream app stores is essentially impossible - a wink, nod, and specious reference to trademark, DMCA, or CFAA is all it takes to get the other tech gatekeepers to collude.
Unfortunately, this all points to the only way we're fixing any of this is some kind of regulation. The centralized tech companies have set up their positions at a Schelling point of individual agency, and have heartily grown into the power vacuum. Like atoms in a gas, it's impossible for us to all just individually move in the same direction at the same time, and so the only way to get a lever big enough to move them is collective action via the government, as imperfect as that is.
Personally I'm in favor of antitrust enforcement that breaks up this bundling between hosting and client software (and hardware devices as well). They should be considered separate products, when developed at the same company be completely independent business units, with backroom communication (eg unpublished APIs) prohibited. I'd say this would get us 80% of the way there to having the choice of tools that don't themselves encourage the spreading of disinformation. Then additional functionality of automated filtering etc could grow organically on top of that, in a user-representing way. But for any of that to happen, the client ecosystems have to be freed first.