It’s complicated. Yes, the country is going to shit, but it is also due to meta’s “Big brother-like” data collection in the name of profit margins.
As mentioned in the article, Facebook could remove itself from this problem by not collecting data that could possibly incriminate people. The reason why they were able to hand over the data is because they were collecting their private messages.
Be nice if it was that simple, but the democratic system itself is broken. We have presidents that come in power while losing the popular vote. We have states that gerrymander their districts to reduce the value of certain demographic’s vote. We have supreme court justices with life terms that are interpretting laws with political bias. Unfortunately, it is getting less and less likely that America is going to improve by working within it’s systems because the system is clearly stacked against us.