This is all seems very Black Mirror, and I can accept the explanation given in the article that this was just a speculative design exercise. However, from a “social engineering” perspective, we don’t need to dig deep to find real life examples. For example, a number of prominent Silicon Valley companies enact politically biased content policies that amount to large scale social engineering. For those who support free speech, it’s clear that those with power ware very willing to abandon classically liberal values and instead just abuse that power. The solution isn’t to apply symptomatic fixes but to solve the bigger problem at hand, which is aggregation of power. These companies need to be split up and/or regulated like the utilities they are.