And then I moved to one of the least affordable areas in the US, which is also a college town and a tourist destination and has huge issues with homelessness and property crime. Here you don't have to use social media anymore. If you want conflict, you can just talk to your neighbors about local issues. Your financial interests and ideas about the future of the community are guaranteed to be in conflict with many of them.
Beyond examples, it would be highly surprising if they weren't doing it. I think the burden of proof is on the person saying that they wouldn't do the thing that any sensible realist actor would do to a rival. That would be a level of bizarre incompetence that is too much to fathom.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
https://openai.com/index/disrupting-deceptive-uses-of-AI-by-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_and_Black_Lives_Matter
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3266870/onli...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/29/politics/iran-covert-influenc...
It's a popular misinformation technique of news companies to do this - planting a false idea in the heads of their enthusiastic audience using truthful information presented in a blustery way that leads people to believe something it doesn't actually say.
You said it's often a troll farm or LLMs controlled by an intelligence agency. I don't see any evidence for that. Unless you take the pedantic meaning of "often" to be "not never but possibly hardly ever".
I'm not denying that it happens, but that it's as significant as you presented it to be.
Their bots are not very difficult to notice if you look at profiles. Weird usernames used to give it away too
This disgusting business model itself is the problem, not some malicious foreign actors (though they no doubt can take advantage of the free exposure the platform will give them if their content "engages" enough people).
The real experience is also there to explore, and is worth exploring, but there is also value in trying something else once in a while, and that is what social media offers. After all, if it were just a digital duplication of outside, why wouldn't you just go outside?