![](/static/66c60d9f/assets/icons/icon-96x96.png)
![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/eb9cfeb5-4eb5-4b1b-a75c-8d9e04c3f856.png)
Anything that touches the internet can be scraped. Mastodon DMs aren’t encrypted, and public posts are obviously public. There’s nothing stopping someone from using the API or any web crawler to harvest data on mastodon users anyway.
Not arguing for/against threads, tbh I don’t even use mastodon much because I don’t really like the idea of microblogging to begin with
I choose to see this question as “If you could magically just make someone a billionaire, who deserves it,” or more specifically “who would actually do good things with the money if they had a billion dollars.”
As you said, the reason these people aren’t billionaires already is because they haven’t been exploiting others. That being said, there are likely a few people that would use the money to better support a lot of great causes, like the Free Software Foundation, medical research, or climate change action