Social media is some of the least free of all markets, because the whole point of it is to be where the people you want to interact with are.
If your entire family is on Facebook, unless you want to deliberately cut yourself off from them, you're going to be on Facebook.
If we had a dozen different fully interoperable social networks (using atproto or some other federating protocol), then you might have a point. But that is not remotely the world we live in.
And if Google is putting LLM features in Gmail...they're not just the "email app" you use, they hold your email address. You'd need to completely change over your email address with everyone who uses it in order to fully get away from them. (Similarly with Microsoft's email...I don't know if they're putting LLM features in it yet, but if not I'd bet they will soon...)
Those are two different definitions of "free market".
The definition you are using is a very strict one, and is only really useful for comparing "market economies" to "command economies". That is clearly not what we are talking about here.
The definition I am using is of an "ideal free market", which is what is required for any of the "free market theory" consequences to come into play. That includes things like revealed preferences theory. An "ideal free market" requires no friction, perfect information, perfect elasticity, etc.
Without that, the idea that you can tell what people "really want" in social media based on which networks they use is completely false.
If your entire family is on Facebook, unless you want to deliberately cut yourself off from them, you're going to be on Facebook.
If we had a dozen different fully interoperable social networks (using atproto or some other federating protocol), then you might have a point. But that is not remotely the world we live in.
And if Google is putting LLM features in Gmail...they're not just the "email app" you use, they hold your email address. You'd need to completely change over your email address with everyone who uses it in order to fully get away from them. (Similarly with Microsoft's email...I don't know if they're putting LLM features in it yet, but if not I'd bet they will soon...)