I agree to an extent, but I don't think the world is actually as centralized as it seems. When you look at the actual population numbers against any platform's active participants it is a lot more spread out than the small pool any of us is familiar with. Like watching some economics stuff within the last few months a professor of economics in Sydney was talking about Italy compared to the rest if Europe and the size of the average factory. Italy was around 10 while the rest of Europe was something like 15 and the guy then breaks down why that is a big deal. I was thinking to myself I never thought about such a small number of people as a "factory" and certainly not as if less than a half dozen people are some big difference maker in a country.

My experience as a buyer for a chain of bike shops was very much like this. Intuition does not scale well to the numbers in reality until you discover the real governing rules and patterns.

I think you might find that the large platforms are obvious targets, but the actual average size of places where people engage will be much smaller than you expect and the number of places far more numerous than you have imagined possible. Political control is not about just the largest gatherings, it is about influencing from the top to well below average.

Russia likes to use convenient idiots. There are a lot of those in all spaces.

Looking at what has happened with Gaza since October 7th. I think Israel is already using AI to target media and make decisions to influence the world. They are basically R&D for the US military. On my own measly hardware I can write a LLM context that mimics a person beyond average and to the point it is not easy to tell if it is a real person or not. If someone as dumb as me can do it, so can others. You only spot the bad bots. Like 4chan GPT was in the wild and undetected nearly 3 years ago now. Models are much better now.

I believe Lemmy is likely about average in scope.