Facebook's algo drives this. It's a choice that they've amplified this content.

Facebook's algo drives interaction, human interaction with this content amplifies this content, just like pretty much every other algorithm. Ragebait sells unfortunately, but this isn't anything new. Seen any news channel since the 24 hour news cycle was introduced?

still because wasn't it like that when they bought it?

This is a response to "everything Meta touches turns to shit". WhatsApp is a fine example.

Now, as in, they didn't design it that way to begin with because it wasn't the profitable thing to do. They have to compete with iMessage, and further, they gain just by being able to tell every cop shop "sorry can't do it bro."

No, because it wasn't a priority when Messenger was built in 2011 lol. Don't rewrite history with what you know today, I don't know if you remember the internet back then, but it was the wild west. Data privacy was not a concern to many.

The truth is more nefarious because for most people "listening to my calls" is scrutable, while adding tracking cookies across the web

This one is more subjective, because to avoid the tracking you can just not use Facebook. If they don't have your personal information they aren't tracking you, they only know some person somewhere interactioned on a site that has Facebook Pixel. They don't even collect your IP address, hence why they use cookies for tracking here.

Not to mention this is all to sell targeted ads, so "evil" would be dramatic imo. Just a company doing what a company does.

or computing social graphs based on your contact info being shared without your consent by a few of your friends,

This isn't true until actual proof is provided.

or doing some ML on every photo shared is not.

Also subjective, just don't use Facebook if you believe this to be the case. Their ML models don't care about you if it can't target you with ads.

Is Meta evil? No. [...] Actually, don't know that I would say "evil" so much as "sociopathic."

"Meta is evil" is what I was discussing. Sociopathic sure, just like every profit driven corporation, but to change this we'd need to unwind our society from profit driven entirely, which I'm all for, but that's a whole other conversation.

I'm just really hoping that this place doesn't get obsessed with Facebook ragebait like Reddit did.