[stevenwoo]

For execs sure it's about managing the product, i.e. the users, especially in what we've seen in public statements from Zuckerberg and Sanders.

For the data scientists and psychologists, it's a chance to work on large scale data/populations and test all sort of theories and hypotheses on a large scale, probably unavailable anywhere else except Google and Amazon as postulated here.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/05/how-onl...

I imagine it's a dream job in that respect, where one gets so caught up in the work the consequences don't matter to the worker until the 2016 US election (Trump got about 25% of the vote in the Bay Area) or Brexit referendum and now these investigative reports.

[ikeyany]

That would be an example of caring more about advancing one's career than the deleterious effects your work has on individuals.