I think that’s a fun concept. I love dealing with the mechanism of realistic hypotheticals.

If I were to answer, I think it’s straight impossible for all of social media to not be funded through advertisements. There must be, to some degree, some site that clings on. But we can modify the prompt to say “the majority of social media will not be funded by advertisements.” In this case, I feel like there are a couple potential mechanisms, of varying likeliness:

• people collectively become more aware of their browsing habits and start using non-advertised sites (highly unlikely)
• the government steps in and collectivizes major social media sites (highly unlikely)
• the Fediverse, or some other alternative, becomes so popular that it becomes the primary social media site (not likely, but not impossible)
• social media sites shift their business structure so that users have to pay for social media usage, but in return they get no ads (actually possible with a not-insignificant chance of this actually occurring)
• social media sites find some other way of exploiting users that is currently considered either implausible (not likely, but I wouldn’t put this one out of the realm of possibility)