I fundamentally do not understand how we've gotten to a point where social media has become anything other than a completely optional indulgence that we engage with in our free time to gain not-critical ephemeral pleasure out of.

This cultural addiction to social media has caused us to throw our beliefs and convictions right out the window. People on HN are talking about breaking up Facebook, passing new "social media use" laws, and every other imaginable way of ignoring the reality that none of this is important.

You can log out of Facebook/Twitter/HN/Reddit/TikTok/Instagram and be completely rid of their influence on you. You could do that right now if you wanted. You could start an alternative social media company that solves these problems "the right way" and force these companies via competition to address these issues.

There are a million ways any person in the world could completely solve this problem for themselves, but we'd rather discuss forcing a privately owned corporation into doing things that aren't profitable or wise for itself?

I know the mob has decided it's entitled to the services offered by Facebook (e.g. WhatsApp), but that doesn't mean you actually are entitled to those services, regardless of how ubiquitous they are. Your complacency is not Facebook's fault or problem.