It is a design choice to offer a news feed that combines verified news sources with conspiracy blogs — interspersed with photos of a family picnic — with no distinction between these very different types of information. It is a design choice to use algorithms that find the most emotional or outrageous content to show users, hoping it keeps them online. And it is a design choice to send bright red notifications, keeping people in a state of expectation for the next photo or juicy piece of gossip.
Platform design is a silent pilot steering human behavior.
No, it cannot.
They are confronting what is obvious, effective tools to undermine democracy with some weird experiment that is at best a niche effort to do online social engineering much more than it is social media.
Social media is a destructive force. By nature. Yes, Fedi as well.
You learn to manage in society, maybe. Like you do addiction and cancer and crime. The techno-optimism stuff is borderline delusional at this point.