While, yes, influences of course use social media, most companies have realized having a social media presence is important today. I would be interested to see stats on how beneficial social media has been to, say, Wendy's.
My wife for example has a $200k+ job that involves a whole lot of interaction with social media. For her that would mean ending her job and moving on to god knows what, but probably not anything that pays near as well.
And then you come to the people that represent her customers. They make 70%+ of their income advertising services either on line or social media platforms.
So you end up in a race conditions. These people can't quit social media in one way or another or they stop eating. The customers have to move somewhere else first to redistribute the power the companies hold over those needing to advertise. Mostly what we see is not people quitting social media, but just moving to another social media platform shifting the problem. But also, because these people are advertising and doing tangentially related things on social media it brings their users to social media to get information.
If a programmer says I'm not going to use AI and the company says use AI, the programmer can absolutely walk, but god, I would not want to try to find a new job right now.
This is why things like unions and consumers pushing for consumer protection laws are fought by companies so hard. They are far more effective than individual actions because the incentives are against individual success.
Do you support the coal miner's union and protecting those jobs? What if it's at a loss? What about the environmental impacts? I see parallels with social media. Is your wife's $200,000 job worth the creation of iPad kids or the lives lost due to vaccine misinformation?
I'm not judging you or anything, you guys gotta do what you gotta do just like the guy selling cigarettes, the gal working in the coal mines, or the folks getting kids addicted to sweets.
But going back to the OP here you posted about this as though there's some "privilege". I strongly disagree with that assertion. If anything, I'd argue your point of view is the privileged one. You get to make as a household $200,000 selling using Facebook. What about the barista? What about the mom struggling whose kid learns about Tide Pods and goes and eats one and has a $15,000 medical bill?
Separately I find it quite annoying that somehow accusing me or someone else of privilege when you're bringing in $200,000 just from Facebook lol. Like really? I mean I don't care, I am proud of my privilege (whatever that amounts to) and will use it to my every advantage, but you should take a hard look in the mirror.
I want to mention there's a lot of nuance in these discussions and specific instances and we're painting in broad strokes. There are connecting themes but also meaningful differences.