The titans of social media are trapped, and we’re all suffering for it. As free services, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube monetize you by keeping you engaged, so they can show you more ads. The services are designed to exploit our brain chemistry, flashing us notifications and giving us one more hit of algorithm-recommended video. If they didn’t, their revenue would dwindle and shareholders would be unhappy.

Matt Simon covers cannabis, robots, and climate science for WIRED.

This is not a mutually beneficial relationship, as the platforms like to say; it’s a parasitic one. Social media hoovers up our energy and most intimate data, and in return we get anxiety and the destabilization of democracy.

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It’s gotten to the point where the tech giants know more about you than the government does. Take it from Yael Eisenstat, who served as a CIA officer, a diplomat in East Africa, and an adviser to Vice President Biden before joining Facebook in 2018 to tackle its election meddling problem. “I get to make this joke—not everyone does, having been in both places—but Facebook knows you better than the CIA ever will,” she says. “Facebook knows more about you than you know about yourself.”

Terrifying, sure, but the platforms that manipulate us for profit may not do so unchecked for much longer. WIRED sat down with Eisenstat to talk about why that is, why she quickly left Facebook, and why lawmakers aren’t as clueless as you think they are.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.