Surprised the author didn't reference the time when Facebook set out to intentionally manipulate hundreds of thousands of people by playing with their emotions [1]. Facebook made like 200,000 people start to feel sad on purpose and bragged about their abilities in a "scientific paper". That's in quotes because their lawyers say that you give your "informed consent" to be psychologically experimented on when you sign up for Facebook.

Facebook does in fact decide to basically torture people into a depression with its power. Facebook is an evil entity and their intentional emotional torture exerted onto its users far surpasses the kind of thing you're quoting NYT for. Not excusing NYT here but Facebook is next-level-evil when it comes to psychological experimentation on unwilling and non-consenting users.

[1] Lots of articles on this, here's a random one from Google searching: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...

(edited for accuracy, millions->thousands)