Billions of people are on social media platforms run by massive companies who spend enormous sums of money researching how to get and keep people addicted to their platforms. Vast teams of highly paid experts spend their days figuring out how to keep people coming back, and their happiness or well being are not a concern. Conflict and rage get engagement, so they push conflict and rage.

It's everything previous generations feared about the "boob tube" but a thousand times worse, since it's precisely personalized and backed by analysis and data that TV executives wouldn't have even dreamed of having.

Mastodon is the only social media I pay attention to, because it's the only one that doesn't constantly shovel addictive shit in my face. The fact that approximately nobody uses it, but most of the planet uses the big corporate addiction factories, is in my eyes well worth the quoted statement.