I'm dead sick of hearing this argument. One, it's completely legalistic. The holocaust was legal too. Two, it's incorrect. The government has been in trouble for coercing private entities like this before. I'm sure it would not pass in the current supreme court. They only got away with it for so long because they did it secretly from the public.
Given the choice, this is obviously behavior that should be stopped by legal intervention or possibly green Mario. There was no punishment because the worst of it passed before it was made public, much like nobody got imprisoned for various CIA crimes or whatever. Thats it.
What a bizarre doomer set of goalposts. One, we literally had an election and now Facebook's no longer doing this, thats a win for a start. We also shut down USAID and I got to read an article crying about how a bunch of people no longer get paid $300,000yr running nonprofits to bring in immigrants and spread propaganda, so thats cool. Some of the stuff coming out of the current supreme court has been good.