While, yes, influences of course use social media, most companies have realized having a social media presence is important today. I would be interested to see stats on how beneficial social media has been to, say, Wendy's.

Yea, I think among a fair portion of HN there is a misunderstanding of how economically connected social media is to businesses and people. For example Meta is one of the largest advertising agencies on earth.

My wife for example has a $200k+ job that involves a whole lot of interaction with social media. For her that would mean ending her job and moving on to god knows what, but probably not anything that pays near as well.

And then you come to the people that represent her customers. They make 70%+ of their income advertising services either on line or social media platforms.

So you end up in a race conditions. These people can't quit social media in one way or another or they stop eating. The customers have to move somewhere else first to redistribute the power the companies hold over those needing to advertise. Mostly what we see is not people quitting social media, but just moving to another social media platform shifting the problem. But also, because these people are advertising and doing tangentially related things on social media it brings their users to social media to get information.