I can understand not having the energy to care about long messages from companies enough to notice stuff like this. Everyone is forced to look at tons of text / media from companies every day demanding your attention, “news” about stuff to get you to spend more time with company products, mixed in with ads, fake “updates” just for you personally to trigger reactions in your brain that make you feel like something social is happening. So many buttons you get shown about agreeing to something or acknowledging something or some terms you’ve never read having changed vaguely with “we care about you”, intentionally obfuscating which ones you’re legally allowed to deny and which ones are going to be forced down your throat in any case.

They added this feature as an opt-out in order to capitalize on your existing relationship with your friends to redirect that social attention to their corporate interests. I’m happy there’s backlash, regardless of whether a user could have theoretically stopped it.