You have things slightly backward. Whenever people say that they get money from hate speech and disinformation I always think of the underpants gnomes in South Park.

Step 1: Destry civilization. Step 2: ?? Step 3: Profit

It lacks logic, and becomes flat out wrong when you consider that advertisers don’t want their ads beside negative sentiment. All things being equal, if you had two social media networks with similar demographics, they will prefer their ads to be on the one that makes people happier and feel better. This has nothing to do with morals and everything to do with profit and sentiment analysis in marketing

The issue is that people are inherently incapable of freely sharing and consuming information responsibly. They do not check against information that confirms their biases. Echo chambers form on a scale that is not possible to police without a state-sized apparatus. They are betting that ML models will solve this, but I don’t think that will be possible in the foreseeable future. I’m not worried that social media giants are evil and want to destroy the world. What worries me is that they don’t want this, are actually spending colossal sums of money on it, and are failing.

When Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were young they were actually credited with aiding occupy movements and the Arab Spring. One Egyptian activist talked about Facebook specifically as a media where they could spread hope, and that the generations they were fighting against didn’t have the understanding to fight back. Well they developed that understanding somewhere along the way. That is how these platforms are built. That is the inevitable function of their form unless the state claims control and places it under their own moderating apparatus. Whether Zuckerberg is a saint or a lizard has 0 to do with the outcome of this type of technology.