"Someone said something else was bad and it wasn't, so therefore anything else that someone says is bad is also not bad" is an obviously incoherent argument once you strip it down to its basics.

Yeah no I get what you mean, but my argument is like, you should try to be resilient against the arbitrary whims of the powers that be regardless of what their flavour of the week is. Asymmetric power/influence is a dynamic that will always exist in society, especially exacerbated by the scale and reach we see today.

Absolutely! But one of the tools we created to make this possible is government. There are forces (like multinational corporations) that exceed the power of an individual or many individuals to mitigate.

Social media is a far more “effective” technology than TV was, which was more effective than radio before it, and so on. It’s very important we figure out how to counteract these things because the trend is obviously in one direction, which is not the one that culminates in individuals having full, conscious agency over their lives and wellbeing.

Ah totally, I exclaim frequently that there should be government-backed open source and decentralized software[0], putting power of technology into the hands of everyone (rather than letting this power get consolidated into monopolistic corporations) ... but then, what we seem to have currently is a huge correlation of motives between state and industry, and neither seem to have the incentive to put power in the hands of individuals. And individuals often don't even want it either. Either way though, yeah, regulation is long overdue for SO MUCH of this stuff.

[0] luckily EU seems to be doing a lot more in that direction, e.g. https://commission.europa.eu/about/departments-and-executive...