People living in economically depressed conditions are eager and happy to make $10 off a creator fund, or even $5 for selling a user account with 1 million followers to a kid in America who wants to look like a fashion or music industry influencer... These platforms are not full of honest business people struggling to create public awareness for their brand, they're full of jaded honest people, corporate influence, political influence, and scammers.
There are tons of people literally creating drab content, and often lying in it about success secrets and tips to succeed on platforms as well. There are also tons of ad-sponsored posts run by everyone from scammers to people selling goods manufactured in sweat shops on top of all the legitimate (honest) product and service sellers.
The people competing to gain social media attention are as diverse as the schemes they generate, and that's inversely what is destroying any possible productivity for honest content, contributors, and artists on social media.
There is an endless stream of people that are eager to capture public consciousness, and the platforms weaponize it to make investors and management rich -- Just like a farmer's market, the landlord can basically sit back and charge everyone for rent, while the booth operators all furiously scramble to position themselves and sell enough to make a living. The platforms have grown to be far too large for anything great to come out of them for honest operators.
I'm asking who creates them and why? How does a nation state benefit from a spam post about a child riding a watermelon motorcycle with lots of AI generated comments
These bots are all over twitter. Make a new twitter account and don't post for two weeks. You'll be followed by about 15 bots, each with an AI generated profile picture, no posts and a history of likes of a random smattering of posts with no coherence. The fake likes are purely for the veneer of legitimacy.
1) build networks of accounts that amass many followers to facilitate data collection (scraping public or friend-only profile data, photo, and text) without hitting rate limits, for the purposes of building surveillance-ready profiles of a nation's or the world's citzenry and to build face identification datasets on foreign populations for later use, in other words building a web scraping network in a foreign controlled data ecosystem with mixed privacy settings for non-logged in accounts
2) maintain swaths of accounts with many followers for a "rainy day" when you want to be able to communicate en masse to a nation or language-sphere's populace with subtle propaganda or straight up messaging
3) distract a populace from any matter of subjects or manipulate them to pay attention to the things you want them thinking about / looking at
4) provide cover for #3 by creating such a mass of content that the stuff you really care about is more easily hidden amongst the noise
5) dumb down a foreign population to weaken them economically - everyone knows the Douyin (domestic TikTok) has legal limits in place on allowed content especially for minors that is intended to promote intellectual growth and productivity, there's no such limits on Tiktok, and it wouldn't be hard to imagine they could facilitate the opposite for the PRC's subtle benefit
... I'm just freestyling here and I'm sure I could reach 20 in a matter of 10-20 minutes