The only way out of this is for people to disconnect from social media and to find an alternative, something in the vein of blockchain, something decentralized.
There are a few projects pointing in that direction.
There's a lot of buzz around
urbit, which I just got installed (it was a bit easier than I expected, actually, although it
does require a bit of familiarity with the Unix command line at this point). From the description at the website:
Urbit is a new OS and peer-to-peer network that’s simple by design, built to last forever, and 100% owned by its users. Under the hood, Urbit is a clean-slate software stack compact enough that an individual developer can understand and control it completely.
We built this new stack to give people a single integrated tool for communicating and building communities – a tool they can trust, control, and extend to their liking. We want to do away with the terrible user experience of the current ‘frankenstack’ of apps and services that we all use today.
Urbit is designed to become an effective, customizable productivity tool for collaborators, and a calm noninvasive communication tool for friends and families.
It's still pretty bare bones but it already works quite well as a communications platform, and it's designed for surveillance and censorship to be quite difficult. Supposedly Urbit IDs also double as crypto wallets; I haven't tested that yet. One downside, aside from requiring a certain minimal level of technical competence to us it, is that IDs are either temporary, or need to be purchased and hosted (at $20/month). Then again, if you're not paying, you're the product.
Another project is the
DWeb (Distributed Web), which looks to be a bit slicker and makes many of the same claims at Urbit. However, I'm a bit skeptical, as the main developer, Jared Rice Sr., went to jail for a cryptocurrency scam. Now, he of course claims that he was set up by the Feds, due to his opposition to the Federal Reserve Bank ... which is certainly not outside the realm of possibility ... but is of course exactly what a grifter
would say. In this case I don't know enough to say one way or another, but personally my gut tells me it's too good to be true given that a) Urbit has been going for much longer, with a larger dev team and b) Urbit is nowhere near as slick as DWeb claims to be. So, buyer beware in that case (also it looks like he's soliciting donations, which is ... suspicious....)