They were connecting people.

They had to make positive results.

They had to bow down to the culture wars and the people in government.

They had to X, or the concequences to them would be bad.

I know that many people in trust and safety, civil society, etc. cut their teeth doing safety at Meta. They had many genuinely upstanding people who tried to do the right things for their users. People who pushed the issues to their leadership.

However, you do not get paid by reducing time on site. You are not valuable, when you are from a cost center that is reducing revenue.

I know that T&S conferences have to discuss how to describe the work as revenue accretive, just so that leadership listens before doing something horrifically bad.

Within firms, the incentives mean engineers grow by figuring out how to remove /automate T&S, rather than fulfil requests from T&S teams.

You get what you build incentives for. Even on HN you see this. There are more converastions on the threat of censorship than on actual research or papers and safety.