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.

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.

WIRED: So going to work for Facebook after working for the CIA is an ... interesting career move. Why did they bring you on board?

Yael Eisenstat: The role on paper was actually right for me. My understanding was that I would be building a brand-new team within the business integrity division, whose respon­sibility would be to figure out how to keep the platform from being exploited for political purposes or to manipulate elections around the world.

That was just never what the job turned out to be. On day two, my manager let me know she was changing my title from Head of Global Elections Integrity Ops to manager. She basically said she was rethinking what I'm actually responsible for and what I'm not. I did not get to talk about hiring my own team. Everything was chipping away at putting me in a corner and not letting me engage or do the work I was there to do.

WIRED: So why hire you, then? A PR stunt?

Eisenstat: I don't think it was a PR stunt. Honestly, it was the most confusing professional experience of my life. Some people have asked, do you think they hired you to silence you? I wasn't this huge critic of Facebook, but I was starting to headline events and be interviewed more and more. And I actually don't think it was that either. I don't think it's that they don't think they can fix it. I wanted to do way more than they were going to do. That I'm sure of. But again, not on day two. That's the part I can't fully wrap my head around.

Once I walked in that door, I was never once empowered to do the work I was hired to do. And in fact, more than not being empowered, I was purposefully sidelined. It's Facebook, everyone talks about it being a flat organization—everybody talks about how anybody can go talk to anybody. It was never that way for me. My boss intentionally never let me participate in any of the meetings that were specifically about the job I was hired to do. I would ask constantly: I hear you're having a meeting about political advertising, and what we're going to do about it ahead of the midterms. That's what I was told I was going to be leading, and she would not even let me come to those meetings.