Assuming social media companies are profitable via their normal services, then how they are hurt by downstream AI companies squeezing out a bit of leftover value? Because it feels like me being mad because I find out Jiffy Lube is making money reselling the used oil from my oil changes without giving me a cut.
I think it's a mistake to block third party providers from profiting from their service. First of all the hypocrisy in that all of these large companies exist because of massively profiting off of mostly uncompensated user-created content. Second, this drive toward relentlessly monetizing every aspect of your company's business is how we get degraded services like Microsoft putting ads in their search bar. It's one thing if a downstream OEM does it, I can just use an alternative OEM that doesn't shovelware the crap out of their product. But when the primary provider does it, then their service is permanently borked and eventually becomes unusable. So if the idea of blocking scrapers is because the goal is to eventually provide their own shitty AI services, I think Twitter et al are just going to end up killing their own geese -- making their own services unusable out of greed.