Some former Facebook employees are testifying to the US Congress <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/former-facebook-manager-we-took-a-page-from-big-tobaccos-playbook/> as part of a hearing into the role social media platforms play in spreading extremist and radical content. Tim Kendall, former director of monetization, says: “We took a page form Big Tobacco’s playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset.” After making some more direct comparisons with how tobacco companies made their product more addictive, he talked about “engagement”, which was the measure Facebook tried to maximize above all else: “We initially used engagement as sort of a proxy for user benefit,” Kendall explained. “But we also started to realize that engagement could also mean [users] were sufficiently sucked in that they couldn’t work in their own best long-term interest to get off the platform... We started to see real-life consequences, but they weren’t given much weight. Engagement always won, it always trumped.” If a company becomes large and powerful, and cannot be trusted to exercise that power responsibly, then it must be taken from them.