They’d be doing this change on their TVs, in principle this would be no different from displaying the settings menu that comes up when you press the * button, no tampering of the HDMI signal required. HDMI inputs are their own “channels” in the UI so it’s pretty trivial to put ads on the screen periodically when one such channel is open.

I mean a distaste for capitalism puts you in good company here but Mao’s China is one of the shittiest examples you could pick as an alternative, that’s one of the governments the right throws around as a stereotype for why they say communism is horrible and they do that with good reason.

It’s a gamble on the idea that people rely so much on the existing content and connections on social networks, in conjunction with the addictive nature of social media, that any attempts to move to a different platform would fail because anything new will always fail expectations of what’s considered normal content-wise these days. People leaving sites like twitter complain about the lower quality and advertisers get scared off, but all the owners of these sites pay attention to is the people that come crawling back because nothing else is capable of meeting their expectations right this instant.