I personally don’t see my goal, the goal of projects I work on, the goal of companies I work for, or anything else I contribute to, to be about manipulating people behaviors without their knowledge and/or consent.

Facebook has been doing completely unethical experiments since forever (are you aware of their role in Rohingya’s genocide in Myanmar?). They have been open about a lot of them, bragging how good they are at manipulating crowds.

And yes, they are crazy effective. And they have the scale. They have unethical behaviors, that are effective, applied at humanity scale.