>but what a given user spends their attention on

I want to point out, since I have not seen it elsewhere in this thread, that user's do not need to be on the internet at all. Does no one remember what it was like to be bored? With respect to living everyday lives, social media addiction is becoming an issue. Instagram specifically is a huge item.

So it would be contradictory to say Meta is responsible for manipulating its users and successfully furthering people's addiction to social media in general, while also claiming that people are using meta products with time and attention that would have been spent on the internet anyway (0-sum).

Are they or are they not incentivizing people to spend more time on social media than they otherwise would have?