Yar. To pull people in most social sites first simply showed what you followed, friends or pages, in real time. The present is anything but social. Algorithms fracture groups into targeted isolated bubbles of discontent. Most feeds now are unrecognizable as how they were, just as 'news media' became driven by ratings. All serving the same corporate masters. Rational critical thinking doesn't drive engagement, of course. Leading to the cyber feudal oligarchy and post truth plutocracy we now love and enjoy.
It's really the anti public era. Like some have written about 'Democracy Without Demos'. Democracy, what little we ever had, was built on common spheres from public halls, civic organizations, human edited newspapers. Advertising companies certainly helped form our modern hell, sharpening methods in dividing people into target audiences, and now our 'demos' into countless micro-tribes. Each tribe has its own facts, villains, heroes, and fears. Destroying democracy by destroying the public instead. Broken audience sections manipulated by psychographic messaging. Resulting in the image of legitimacy without any consensus. Once no one can agree on what is real anymore, corporations and governments can easily mandate whatever they wish. Surveillance capitalism algocracy .
