Technical goals and Political goals are always 2 different things. And in this case neither is clearly defined or will be clearly defined, because Social Media was never built with a Goal in mind.
There is no Political Goal or Purpose like reduce Price so everyone can afford healtcare or education. Basically the Political goal of Social Media as a system is nonexistent so far.
The system we have today, was built because it became technically possible to provide Broadcast capability to everyone for Free.
Prior to its arrival you had to literally own a movie studio or a newspaper or a tv/radio station or license radio spectrum to do BROADCASTING ie get you message to as many as possible. You could put up a website sure, but the chances of anyone finding it without access to the above broadcasting methods (to spread the word) would be 0.
Even after the internet appeared and connected everyone up, sending broadcasts to the whole planet via TCP/IP would cause routers to melt down or get you kicked off the network.
Thanks to moores law, all that changed, and routers could handle crazy loads, and suddenly allowing people to Broadcast was possible.
No one asked why is such capability required? What problems does it solve?
Instead the technical focus went towards - how do we handle the Info Explosion that was a consequence. Everyone was connecting to the same network and everyone was broadcasting. Simultaneously. So How are people going to get noticed if everyone is speaking? How does music emerge out of millions playing their own tunes without a conductor?
The answers were half baked because there was never any goal to this system. The answers being Page Rank and the Like/Follower Button. Both creating an entire new set of problems involved never ending spam and gaming of the ranklists. So the focus shifted again to how do we get better Quality results.
And tech response was to collect Personal data. Opening the gates to Advertising and influence/attention wars. So the "answers" keep creating new problems.
With all these distractions, the original question still remains unanswered - why do we all need these systems? Why do we all need to be broadcasting? When is it producing something good? When is it not? When is it required either way? when is it not required either way?
We dont need to be building all kinds of garbage to handle an info explosion if these questions have answers and lead to clear political goals.