To start off with my personal beliefs... I agree - I see a much broader harm in how platforms try and make themselves addictive as I've worked on such systems in the past. I think the public and even most technical folks that aren't deep into engagement metrics underestimate how studied the field has been and how many iterations of approaches to daily engagement reminders, friction removal and FOMO have been worked through to get to the point we're at today. In my opinion, which absolutely isn't fact, this work is broadly unproductive at improving our daily lives - I can understand that there are some compelling counter arguments that these developments can be harnessed for good but I don't share them.
But, specific to this article and ignoring my personal beliefs - I still find this judgement to be severely lacking. I don't think this judgement is nearly noticeable enough to Meta to actually provide a significant impact on the way they do business outside of tidying up some specifically egregious corners and making sure they internally communicate moving forward in a way that appears to comply with the judgement. The judgement was enough when applied to this pool of users to make these specific users unprofitable in retrospect (e.g. Meta would have more money if it had refused to even do business with these users) but I'm also concerned that the pool of considered victims was so narrow that it excluded a significant number of similarly harmed victims and that the amortized damages end up being negligible.
But, specific to this article and ignoring my personal beliefs - I still find this judgement to be severely lacking. I don't think this judgement is nearly noticeable enough to Meta to actually provide a significant impact on the way they do business outside of tidying up some specifically egregious corners and making sure they internally communicate moving forward in a way that appears to comply with the judgement. The judgement was enough when applied to this pool of users to make these specific users unprofitable in retrospect (e.g. Meta would have more money if it had refused to even do business with these users) but I'm also concerned that the pool of considered victims was so narrow that it excluded a significant number of similarly harmed victims and that the amortized damages end up being negligible.