Earlier quoted context omitted.
The largest social media company in the world by several orders of magnitude is Meta, who are both using data collected from their social media platforms to train their AI models and improve ad targeting. Meta also offers AI chat bots on their platforms (FB Messenger and WhatsApp), to capture those innermost thoughts. Don’t count out Zuckerberg, he’s very good at being a villain.
The mother of social media is free TV. We tend to forget that both, the social and the media part, input and output, are interpersonal, first. Ad targeting doesn't need improvement. The incentives offered to people with an adverse attitude towards Ads are shit. Think of incentives as having effects and side effects. It's about intent. Free TV had that down ages ago. It was awesome. But they fucked market entry and wh…
TV was filtered and averaged to appeal to a wide audience. By design, it could not target small niches like social media does. Or amplify them - only a few, selected people, with hard edges removed, became part of a broadcast. Same for ads, we did not have 1% of the current targeting and retargeting capabilities.