I think there are a lot of moving parts, there are tech investors who want their money, there are machine learning companies that are hungry for data, and there are certainly fecal matter stains who want more control of the discourse.

We’re no longer in the era of free money (when interest rates on loans were lower than inflation) so companies and investors can’t just take out more loans to pay for the growth of a company that will figure out how to make money eventually.

Additionally that “eventually” has come, a lot of people just retired at a much faster rate (we went from about a million people retiring a year to five million retiring a year in the US)

Everyone who is retired needs their investments to start paying out now, that means all the bankers, money managers and VC goons need ti start getting their money back form the tech companies they’ve been lavishing investment on the past two decades.

They poured money in to capturing the internet and now they’re locking everything down to make their money back, that means cracking down on ad blockers, herding users in to walled gardens where they can be price gouged, and halting the free scraping of data through free API

Machine learning systems are apparently the next hotness that’s going to gush profits, and the raw input for that is data off the internet to train programs, so the social media sites are locking down their data so that they can charge machine learning companies to train on it.

Combine all this and you get the anti-user crap storm we’re currently in. Ad blockers need to go, free and open API needs to go, the profit must flow and if it doesn’t a lot of people in the upper echelons will find their preverbal knee caps smashed in.