This was originally a roleplay ad, but it has enough world-building and length that I hope it can be admitted as a small story on its own too.
It’s 2048, Western liberal democracies still exist on paper, but the top 0,01% owns 85% of the wealth, which in practice means a level of control of politics, law and media that makes the early 21st Century be remembered as impossibly good times. AI cannot sustain a proper conversation yet but it now allows a very efficient, simple and discreet control of social media content, identifying and silencing opinions and ideas that might make people act against the system, and creating massive amounts of astroturfed content that justifies hardships as unavoidable lesser evils and sows division among those suffering them. Now, social media is just one more branch of top-down traditional media, which monopolizes the access to information, just as in the second half of the 20th century, but even more tightly. Any political agent that is not meant to perpetuate the system is filtered out and silenced, and in the rare case where it reaches a bit of a size, infiltrated and broken from inside.