Jess indeed said that, but also quite a few people pretty much lauded that Labour was so omnipresent on social media and that the response from the users was so overwhelmingly positive not realizing that Twitter and Facebook showing them what they want to see (and in some cases if the leaks to be believed factions in their own party targeted party politicians with their own ads).

Targeted ads and bespoke feed algorithms are bad enough, but when you combine it with political campaigns it's just a recipe for disaster.

And this isn't a problem that is easy to solve and honestly I don't know how and if it can be solved. Targeted ads are arguably the easy one but even then how you define targeting, as well as what is clearly a political ad (e.g. a corporation making an ad that exploits a given event such as BLM, OW or anything remotely political), the feed is oh boy... People want their feeds curated for them, at this point these platforms know their users better than the users know themselves they know what content keeps them engaged and what drives them away and that's the problem. The content that may be relevant for a given user isn't necessarily a content that would have a positive effect on that user and "what is good for X" is the tricky part because it's inherently political and manipulative and any way you look at it it is social engineering.

I don't know what you can do and if you can put the genie back into the bottle if 10 years ago someone told me that social media could escalate civil war and genocide I would looked at them weirdly at this point I'm honestly not going to discount the possibility of some sort of butlerian jihad against social media in a decade or two.

Silicon valley (et al.) is now trading in humans, at its core it's essentially a slave market in which companies sell your attention and most importantly your moldable perception of reality to the highest bidder. And at least I personally don't see a way out of it, regulating it to death might be worse since it would grant political institutions control over the same shit that is happening right now and for the most part I rather Coca Cola and Nike molding my beliefs than any given political party and I don't care if their values align with mine or not, at this point I see nice obedient corporate drones being the lesser evil in all this. Any business model that with outlaw the current practices likely won't be sustainable and would be near impossible to enforce, these companies are worth billions because they give anyone with a credit card and and idea the ability to shift what some people think and this isn't going to go away.

Shutting down completely well, I don't use social media other than reddit (and I rotate my reddit accounts) and HN, I don't have Facebook and I don't have a twitter account (I read tweets that are linked but don't log-in), nearly everyone around me uses 3-5 social media platforms daily.

Social media run amok combined with the overgrowing distrust and disillusion in democracy in the west really scares the shit out of me, especially in the US I really cannot rule out major civil disorder to a borderline civil war in some areas, and TBH Europe isn't much better it's just not as well armed. Civil wars don't have to be fought with guns and tanks to be deadly nations can be brought to a halt with enough small scale violence too (just look at France for example).