You could argue that, but are these personal benefits not just checks from lobbyists? And does this power not come largely from the leverage they gain expanding their influence in order to justify bigger checks?

I remember writing a comment about invasive advertising by Instagram. Just shared some anecdotes about how a few extremely specific conversation topics soon became the topic for the ads I was seeing on Instagram, and pointed out that if they were in fact using background conversation to target ads, it would be extremely easy to automate with the voice recognition technology available at the time, so why would they ignore the opportunity if targeted ads are their main source of revenue?

It became one of my most down voted comments at the time, and I had about twice as many replies as downvotes, claiming all kinds of wild or easily disproven shit to disprove the idea that Instagram used such tactics. Was very fishy