I think there's a bigger issue at play.

Rid makes an insightful point that I've mentioned many times before: free societies pay a heavy penalty when their governments lie because adherence to the government is based on trust. Autocracies pay no penalties when their governments lie because adherence to the government is based on fear. As a result, any conflict between an authoritarian society and a free society will involve the authoritarian society spreading as many lies as they can - if your opponent relies on integrity to rule, damage their integrity. They have no counter.

Any thoughtful wonk tasked with coming up with a "public square" social media platform for a free society would make it a utility, monitored by public health and safety officials, with surveillance and enforcement that matched that society's civil standards. Remove the phrase "free society" and you have VK and WeChat to a T. On the other hand, the principle task of social media platforms within Western, capitalist nations is "engagement" ie outrage in order to drive advertising dollars. As a result, the madder it makes people the richer the founders become.

This, of course, creates a feedback loop: if you want clout on social media, you make people mad. If you want to get rich with social media, you maximize anger. Before too long your metaphorical corner coffee shop has become Thunderdome. I remember when the Internet was a lovely place to meet interesting people; my web designer (22) holds as her mantra "never become a main character on the Internet." The overlap is complete: social media becomes a mechanism whereby Enrique Tarrio and "Donbass Devushka" are your advertising dollars. Then you add in the right-wing takeover of Facebook, Musk's Thiel-led takeover of Twitter and the psyop known as Tiktok and it becomes pretty clear that the current utility of social media is for totalitarian societies to stir shit up in free ones.

And I think people are fucking sick of fighting.

We've slowly learned that social media is where you go to get mad. I think we can unlearn that? But I think it's gonna be even slower. I've taken to telling people that Russia must fall in order to keep Donald Trump off of fucking Facebook and I mean it. Until social media can be turned into a utility good for something other than chaos agency, it's fucking done. We've turned it from a place people go to talk to a place people go to laugh and point. Conversations have been replaced by clout-chasing. Moderation is utterly lacking - I posted an interview with a formerly-Russian band to my I-fucking-hate-having-it page for the show and the result has been daily battles with Russian trolls trying to take my page down. Any actual engagement? Naah. An opinion is an excuse to get kicked in the nuts. So the people with opinions are the ones who want nothing more than to encourage nut-kicking.