Looks like protection rackets are back.
Nothing should surprise us now, we should expect businesses of all descriptions, not just social media, to turn more and more towards straightforward crime, to try to maintain margins and shareholder / investor returns.
Why is it happening; it's because availability of energy in the environment is becoming thinner, more difficult to extract. This doesn't just mean utilities energy, it means all energy, including the energy we each need to metabolise, about 150J per second, 24/7, 0.1 GWhrs for life.
What is needed to replenish it is creation, more things growing, creation of stuff direct from solar.
Everyone having to pay for data protection or anything on any platform, is effectively paying the platform energy, because money is energy always, physically.
The platform then paying energy to owners and shareholders, this is also payment of energy. So the owners and shareholders of the platform are all getting their energy from the platform users.
Then all those users has to do more work, or do more business for profit, to make what they are paying to the platform to avoid this threatening security of their own their own metabolistic energy supply. That then follows through all supply chains to energy physically extracted from the planet, usually somewhere poor.
The energy yielded from the planet is usually only a small fraction of what is taken from the planet and otherwise thrown to heat, during extraction and refining, and this is never accounted for, and this is what is pushing up the global temperature.
Its not as much about CO2 as mainstream would have you think, because the atmosphere is adiabatic, sorry that kills any logic that there might be a significant blanket effect. Nope, the temperature rise is the raw effect of destruction, destruction is what we really do, we never created, it isn't possible to create on energy extracted from the planet, repeat, not possible.
The only way we can create is by using the energy of the sun, and when we do this, temperature has to come down, because it's temperature reduction by definition.
And guess what, it's getting more and more difficult for folk to keep finding whatever it is they normally sell to make their own livelihoods, because we are not creating, just destroying.
How do we turn this round?
Solar power the platforms using "Money-fuel Tree" architecture, and start issuing solar indexed stimulus.
Even platforms could issue money to users, if they were given that authority.
Governments need to do the same, they become solar powered money fuel tree communities. Banks need to do the same, unless they just want to be absorbed by something like ChatGPT which will automate them out, it being itself something capable of generating money from energy.
This is the only way to move over to creation, folks, and it looks like nature is demanding we start doing it, about now.
How long will they wait, those who think they are in control?