I don't care about them being too open or not. My issue is with them pushing sensational content because it's good for their bottom line. IMHO Alex Jones should have a place to post his male enhancement promotional videos, but if a platform is curating the content and decides to recommend it to everyone because it increases time on site and engagement then they should be responsible for that choice.
I have a consumer app and met with some of the early investors in the top social media companies. They all only cared about DAU/MAU, time in app and user growth. All of them recommended books like Hooked (https://medium.com/startup-grind/nir-eyal-why-you-are-addict...), to help us design something that's more addictive, or anything from BJ Fogg (https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/2021/10...), who had founders of Instagram and Snapchat as his students. A few of them even tried to get us to hire the new hot thing, Dopamine Labs (https://www.builtinla.com/2018/01/11/dopamine-labs-boost-use...), who promised to have "AI" to get users addicted with custom notifications.
I used to think that behavioral psychology was bullshit (my GF studied psychology too), but being exposed to it in the industry there's no denying that some of it works. There's a reason why all headlines are clickbait now and all thumbnails on youtube and netflix are of weird facial expressions (https://www.avclub.com/why-does-everyone-on-youtube-make-the...). It turns out even the color of your app icon can make an impact on how noticeable it is, leading to more downloads and usage (https://uplandsoftware.com/localytics/resources/blog/tips-fo...)