The social media business model is predicated on scaling up obvious and huge conflicts of interest. To scales unfathomable a couple decades ago. Basic ethics,

The social media business model is predicated on scaling up obvious and huge conflicts of interest. To scales unfathomable a couple decades ago. Basic ethics, and more importantly the law, need to catch up. Surveilling, analyzing, then manipulating people psychologically to mine them for advertisers is just as real a poison as fentanyl. And when it scales, that mean billions of dollars in revenue, actual trillions of dollars in market value unrelentingly demanding growth, playing whack-a-mole with the devastating consequences isn’t going to work. Conflicts of interest are illegal in many forms. Business models incorporating highly scalable conflicts of interest need to be illegal. We could still have social media in healthier forms. They wouldn’t be “monetizing” viewers, they would be serving customers. Facebooks army of servers isn’t required to run a shared scrapbook. All those servers, and most of Facebook’s algorithms and now AI, are there to manipulate people to the maximum extent possible.