"Knowingly preying on vulnerable young people to boost profits" is different from blindly optimizing for engagement without understanding what works.

I honestly don't know, but I don't like so disingenuously simple shoot the messenger answers. That being said, if Facebook amplified it willfully knowing the damage already -- then it's a different issue. And I think there is some evidence of that.

Either way its different than tobacco which was created by the company itself.

One could argue that Meta willingly boosted toxic engagement themselves.

This didn't happen in a vacuum. When a controversial post or comment suddenly pops up in your feed, out of nowhere, participants may be responsible for the responses to it, but Meta is very clearly seeking, targeting, and amplifying that toxic behaviour for profit.

You're on hacker news you should know these types of system design issues...

That may have been true fifteen years ago. There is now a decade worth of scientific literature on social network effects on human behaviour, and I think we can agree that this is hardly something not a single Meta executive know anything about.

> You're on hacker news you should know these types of system design issues...

What I'm suggesting is that this is not an issue for them, but a feature.