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> Alcohol (the consumption form) serves only one purpose to get you buzzed.

Since consumable alcohol has other legitimate uses besides getting a buzz on, I don't think this point stands. For example, it's used quite often in cooking and (most of the time?) no intoxicating effects remain in the final product.

We're not talking about "all algorithms" any more than the alcohol example is talking about "all liquids". Social media algorithms have one purpose: to manipulate people into more engagement, to manoeuvre them into forgoing other activities in favour of more screen time, in the service of showing them more ads.

You could sue a hammer manufacturer if they regularly advertised hammers as weapons to children and children started killing each other with them, though.

You said sue the hammer manufacturer. Why didn’t you say to sue the newspaper that ran the ads? The fact that you couldn’t keep that straight in your analogy undermines your argument significantly imo.