Facebook&#x2F;Instagram and Twitter are so botted out by people paying for likes&#x2F;comments&#x2F;retweets, PR agencies, market manipulators, sentiment analyzers and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns that I would say these are not the democratic free for alls they once were. Not to mention gone are the days of strictly chronological feeds - now the algorithm that chooses what users see is a pay-to-win blackbox.<p>There will be a day of reckoning for the social media giants where they face telling their shareholders that XX% of their users... don&#x27;t exist. And then soon there will be a whole tech-point-o iteration of new social media startups who focus on ensuring their user base is real, and that their feed algorithms can&#x27;t be gamed by money or teams of people working artificially (with bots or AI) to influence opinion.