It comes down to the kind of society we want to create, not some existential threat. Social media has an outsized effect on everything from the food people eat to the medical care they receive. The incentives of social media create a great number of distortions within the social media sphere but also in the real world.

Is traveling to Tokyo just to sprint across the Shibuya Scramble for a slightly less-crowded Instagram selfie really a model of the good life? Should someone like Zuckerberg have this level of control over the activities and minds of the human race? Is Mr. Beast a role model for children by industrializing the exploitation of human virtue?

Human social pressure and follower mindsets are part of the human experience but systematically gaming those instincts in real-time so money flows to a social media company at all costs in some strange digital sharecropping scheme is what’s new and the hierarchy of others trying to capture a small piece of that pie creates these distortions.

I couldn't have said any of that better myself...

> Human social pressure and follower mindsets are part of the human experience but systematically gaming those instincts in real-time so money flows to a social media company at all costs in some strange digital sharecropping scheme is what’s new and the hierarchy of others trying to capture a small piece of that pie creates these distortions.

To what I think @krapp's point is: these dynamics are not exclusive to social media. At their core they're led by something far more primal than what social media only exacerbates. Governments are not as naive as the general public. Regulations effected in 2026 to "regulate social media" could have consequences on how information is spread among people in 2040.