It’s easy to feel a certain schadenfreude over news of Meta’s $16.7 billion settlement with almost every state attorney general. Sometimes bad things happen to bad corporations. It’s hard not to cheer.

For years, Meta has largely gone unchecked as it employed a business model that basically amounted to psychologically manipulating people through Skinnerian principles to spend as much time on its platforms as possible, in order to harvest their data and deliver personalized ads.

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