> At least with large centralised organisations their position is relatively clear,

Unfortunately I don't see that as being the case, especially the "relatively clear" part. My first job in my early youth (~20 years ago) was to professionally read newspapers, I did that for about 3 years to get me through school, and even as a professional newspaper reader I couldn't get the "position" for most of the newspapers. Of course, the political rags were pretty obvious, but the mainstream newspapers seemed objective and with no clear bias.

That has changed dramatically in the last few years (I had taken a break from reading the newspapers/magazines shortly before that). Now I open the Economist and I can see that almost every article on the likes of China or Russia has to include something, anything, that can be seen as negative, like "why don't are they like us, Westerners? Why don't they are ruled by a democracy? Because of that they are beneath us".

That goes the other way, too. Major negative stuff happening in the US and in most of Europe is not presented under its true colours, there's always an undertone of "we will get through this, because we are a democracy and the the will of the people will finally prevail".

And the Economist is on the soft side, just reading the headlines of the NYTimes makes it clear as day how biased they are, while the WashPo is owned by a literal oligarch (btw, why isn't anyone in the West up in arms about that?). The only mainstream newspaper that still retains a modicum of neutrality (or which manages to hide its biases pretty well) is the Financial Times.

Again, it took me many years to realise all of this, I'm afraid lots of people are still blind to the biases I exemplified above.

Not sure how your comment relates to that point. The bias of the Economist is well known. Same for the NYT and the Guardian, for example. Who their readership is and how they are funded is more or less public knowledge. The tint of their lens is more or less a given. So it's a known quantity, we can deal with that.

What isn't so well known is who is funding the people making content on Youtube, or Facebook or TikTok. It's a unknown quantity, with the potential to do a lot of damage (to whoever the target is, good or evil), so much so that regimes like the China/CCP (and Russia to an increasing extent) are adamant that it must be controlled at all costs.

Information is a tool. It can be used to do good, but also do terrible things and this is regardless of whether it is traditional media or social media.

> The bias of the Economist is well known. Same for the NYT and the Guardian

I used to regard those type of institutions as pillars of the mainstream media and as such as very solid members of the Fourth Estate. I used to think that we do need a non-partisan, even independent Fourth Estate for our democracy to actually work. My realisation that those media institutions were very biased and as such that the Fourth Estate was itself biased and non-independent kind of shattered my hopes in the future well-being of our democratic process.

> Information is a tool.

That's the thing, I didn't regard (not ultimately, at least) information as being a tool, I genuinely did think that the powers that be behind those mainstream media institution had the interest of the public in mind.

Russia's methods of controlling the social media are, shall we say, a leetle bit different from that of China…

I think one could make a pretty good case that Russia has indeed controlled social media to their benefit. Not tracelessly, but to a really impressive extent. Pity they choose to do with it, what they've done.