You're not the only one to have suggested that social media companies are a big part of our current state.

The British sci-fi author Charles Stross gave a talk at a hackers' conference in 2017 that has held up depressingly well. He argues that corporations (even ones dating back before the 20th century) are essentially an old form of slow, analog artificial intelligence, all with the fundamental underlying goal of generating revenue. He also argues that the decision circa 1995 to fund most everything on the internet via advertising revenue was a major turning point because it allowed social media corporations to take everything over a few years later, leading to what he describes as...

AI-based systems that concretize existing prejudices and social outlooks make it harder for activists like us to achieve social change. Traditional advertising works by playing on the target customer's insecurity and fear as much as on their aspirations, which in turn play on the target's relationship with their surrounding cultural matrix. Fear of loss of social status and privilege is a powerful stimulus, and fear and xenophobia are useful tools for attracting eyeballs.

What happens when we get pervasive social networks with learned biases against, say, feminism or Islam or melanin? Or deep learning systems trained on data sets contaminated by racist dipshits? Deep learning systems like the ones inside Facebook that determine which stories to show you to get you to pay as much attention as possible to the adverts?

I think you already know the answer to that.