Is social media awful by design?

I’ve only just started reading Mark O’Connell’s article in the New Yorker titled “The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media“, but this part stood out for me.

The problem is the business model based on the manipulation of individual behavior. Social-media platforms know what you’re seeing, and they know how you acted in the immediate aftermath of seeing it, and they can decide what you will see next in order to further determine how you act—a feedback loop that gets progressively tighter until it becomes a binding force on an individual’s free will.