Gossip is a hugely important part of how a community constitutes itself. Without gossip, you don't even have a community. Of course, it can go in malicious and destructive directions as well
I think you're confusing "gossip" for "communication". You don't have to have gossip to have a community, but what you say is perfectly true if you replace it with "communication".
I think you have it the wrong way around. The gross product of humans talking about themselves and those around them and gossiping is huge. What else is Twitter really?
Respectfully, I am not. Communication is so broad as to be meaningless in this context. Can you have a community that communicates via smoke signals alone?
If people don't talk about one other then there is no community. It's a fundamental part of human culture, which has existed in every human society ever recorded, and almost certainly every human society every to exist.
The multi billion dollar company has a lot of influence over the people in your community and the things that they gossip about. It also has influence over an increasing number of areas in your life as well. "Targeted ads" are just what they tell us they're doing with our data, because nobody actually cares which ads they see. Ads aren't the only things they do with it though.