To quote the article Facebook really has "unleashed waves of democratic empowerment" among the youth in certain countries where democracy is not present or is under serious assault and the domestic media is censored. If some random dictatorship has strict anti-speech laws Meta is way more lax about following them than the domestic media (who are just going to get arrested if they don't). This really has created a generation of young people in some places who have a less censored view of the world and have a more pro-democratic, pro-egalitarian, anti-dictatorship bent. The only people who miss this are the ones whose reality is generally confined to an e.g. US-only point of view where democracy is secure and stable and the only "threats" to it are basically a joke, like the whole panic over January 6, and you've never seen tanks roll into the capital and depose your elected officials.

In countries where real threats to democracy like that exist, Facebook and Twitter have played a huge role in communicating suppressed information, aiding protest organization, etc. and by and large the kids are into it.

As for a pivot to a Tiktok-style experience -- that's a hard pass for me, it's like mixing cocaine with television. The kids are into that too and it's pretty scary to watch them switch off their brains, set aside their humanity and obediently wait for the ML algorithm's function calls to twitch_human_thumb() that arise every few seconds. Of course people were saying something similar about MTV, remote controls and the boob tube back in the day and somehow we survived...

Ultimately if you're Meta and the government tells you it's OK for you to sell cocaine, after all they're OK with your Chinese competitor importing it -- who are you to say no?

Under the current climate my only confusion is why we haven't let Coke reintroduce their namesake ingredient to their formula. Or to use your example yes I could totally see Taco Bell lacing their meat with drugs if it was allowed!