The fact that a shady business used some tactics to advance its cause doesn't automatically condemns the means.
Which is always bad.
McDonalds: exploits hunger by conditioning you to desire convenient, unhealthy, and ultimately unsatisfying food.
TikTok: exploits your dopamine to condition you to watch content, keeping you entertained with new quick doses constantly.
You can pick almost any major company and find some way they exploit someone else.
Correction, you can pick any extremely large corporation.
Very large (i.e. successful) exploit people by design. Businesses not willing to exploit people are at a disadvantage and can never be as successful as those that are willing to exploit others.
https://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/through-the-lens...
And also Vrba–Wetzler report
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrba–Wetzler_report
I don't want someone to think that i'm blaming someone for reading stuff. I just think and see that sometimes for people it is very easy to forget or miss bad things (harm to society) when their salary (or income) depends on ignoring this.
Because of the latter, businesses leaders can also quite often talk about the former without even noticing that normal people regard "exploiting people" as a bad thing.
Sometimes it's hard to even agree what counts as exploitation of a person: The profit margin of every successful employer I've ever had is, in some sense, them exploiting me — but I've also worked in places where that's negative, loss-making, and the investors paid for my time with the profits made from others, which feels to me like the successes I've been involved with paying for the failures, not exploitation.