and break them all up

A class action lawsuit of several billion people would be kind of cool. Award everyone with $1000 minimum for the last decade+ of damages and see what happens 🤗

It's not about short\long term or anything such.

It's about oligopoly that inserted itself at the core of the society (where town squares, pubs, inns and paper media would be in "good old times"), openly abuses it and claims it's normal. They are basically monetizing lies and distortion.

They are also very centralized and thus anti-democratic.

Taxing is not enough. I'd say making commercial social media should be illegal as a thing. Get back to newsgroups and web forums.

This doesn't mean going back to stone age, nobody forces us to use actual Usenet. Freenet has decentralized newsgroups (Frost and FMS), it's too slow, but P2P newsgroups are not an unsolvable task. Newsgroups don't have to be text-only - if HTML e-mails are a thing, then so can be HTML is newsgroup posts.

Of course nobody will make them illegal, they benefit the same people who make laws.