Understanding social media's shadow side

It's not for the first time in humanity's history that our psychological triggers are actively being used to manipulate us.  

In the 1920's, the founder of public relations and advertising, Edward Berneys used Freud's theories in practice to manipulate people at scale.

Now the same tricks and tools are being used by social media giants to do the same thing.

Now an upcoming Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, goes into far more detail around just how pervasive and dark the social media shadow really is.

But who are the people that create these platforms that we use everyday?

We supposedly trust them to deliver a service that has our best interests at heart, but who exactly are the engineers at Google, Facebook, Amazon etc etc that are making decisions that literally affect lives?

We might know the names of the original founders of these platforms, but there is very little accountability for them, or anyone else for that matter, that control this immense power.

How is this possible? How is it that we are happy for this to be the case? Is it too late to change this, or can society demand more transparency from these social media platforms?