Except they can now monitor a lot more than just phone calls. And they have the infinite memory of data storage so they can look you up later instead of wasting live listeners on you now. And they have real-time automated tools to pop up messages in your face to influence you, or let you report other people for wrongthink.
Employees of these organizations should be raising Cain about it. If they saw it on TV they'd be aghast. But hmmm, in real life they don't seem to mind.
I agree that it is worrying that facebook is trying to determine what is acceptable / true, and what is extremist. People with that kind of position should come by that power through choice of those who consume that truth. That means politicians, editorial boards, opinion makers. Either people who were elected, or people who you can decide to tune out.
The social media companies do not have this mandate. So doing this kind of stuff is bad. But.
But, on the other hand, extremist violence is actually a widely recognized problem, and these platforms are playing a significant role. It makes sense that we try to hold them accountable. The issue is that is leaves them between a rock and a hard place. It makes sense that they want to be more proactive about this stuff. But either it should not be their job, or there should be a choice in who censors / editorializes your facebook. It should not, by default, be facebook itself.
Facebook does not like this though. Facebook does not wanna say "hey all you trump voters, please go somewhere else". It would either break their network effect, or it would force them to go to a federated system. But really, this is the only reasonable solution here. Otherwise facebook is slowly going to alienate and censor Trump voters. Turning more of them into extremist who believe themselves the victim of "the man". And in some sense, they'd be right.