I mean, If what I said affected your world view to the point that you have to respond the way you did, I am not sure what can be said to make it better for you.
This is the field of my work, so I know with certainty the point I am making.
My response to the situation was to learn and understand it so that it can be made better for normal people. So that they have an actual fair chance.
I assume you have the ability to acknowledge the difference between a single individual’s choice at one moment, and the choices of that individual at different times of the day.
Firms don’t bet on a single human making a reasonable choice. The bet that given enough humans, enough will be in the right circumstances to make the choices that benefit the firm.
Even individual agency shifts at different times, which is why food ads play at specific time slots.
No one is an island.
You know that the TikTok feeds are superior at giving the user what engages them and keeps them logged in. I think that is part of your point. You then introduce a "firms don't bet on a single human making a reasonable choice," and that they bet that "enough will be in the right circumstances to make the choices that benefit the firm." This is a conflation that you are making that you might think is necessary to support your hypothesis that the evil scientist, engineers, and researchers are twisting minds.
You can criticize them for making the product too responsive and addicting—sort of like you could criticize Frito Lay for the same thing. What you cannot argue is that the software engineers are trying to make the users bad, stupid, or fat.
Which returns to the original part of this discussion. I said that TikTok was replacing legacy media. When using TikTok was morally questioned, I responded that the output that is consumed is largely determined by the user, and I citied my experience of that.
If you are not saying that TikTok is purposively altering "normal" people in a negative way, but that simply the addictive nature of the software is leading to "normal" people to affect themselves in a negative way because of their choices and tastes, and that it is your job to help force TikTok to change the approach to maximizing engagement in order to protect the users from their bad choices and tastes, then you've got another argument on your hands entirely—one that has many levels that are open to attack.
Let's start with one: who are you to tell us who the "normal" people are, what they should be watching and how much of it, and how do you determine that? Maybe you work in a data role in this "field". What do you call that field? User experience? Information control? "Normal" individual taste and media consumption formation? All very interesting questions.
To go from working with the data to making the claims you have made, you are going to have to button those arguments up a lot.