Its basically a government spyware. Perhaps you can compare it with WeChat but you can't really compare it to FB or Google because the political regimes are different in the US vs China & Russia. All the other conclusions can be drawn from this point.
"almost all controversy would be removed from among Philosophers, if they were always to agree as to the meaning of words" (c)
One could say it was always the case, you can cut through bs and have a productive dialogue if you define the meaning of words before the message, i.e. scientific papers do that. The problem with that is that most people won't do it because its hard and on the other end you will get ostracized most of the time if you try doing that in casual conversations. This problem is even bigger in politics which is a game of large numbers and you have to be as stupid as possible for your message to reach the masses.
They are profitable for a few years now, afaik visa/master pays you a share of their profit each time customer makes a transaction(i.e. share of merchant fee). There are also credits, loans, exchange fees, subscription fees i.e. a lot products that make them money.