People use things they dislike and believe to be bad for society all the time.

It has been a majority opinion that social media is a net negative for society since, what, 2016? But Facebook and Twitter didn't vanish that year, or in any of the years since, despite ever increasing shares of people believing they are harming us. Tumblr and Reddit users have been calling their respective forums "this hell-site" since around 2014, but that didn't make them go away. "Doomscrolling" has been in dictionaries since 2020.

This isn't some crazy concept, it has a million names when looked at from different angles:

Addiction, Perverse incentive, Cognitive Dissonance, Ego Depletion, The Tragedy of the Commons, The Prisoner's Dilemma, Pareto Divergence, Externalities, The Multipolar Trap, The Race to the Bottom, The Collective Action Problem, Coordination Failure, Pluralistic Ignorance, Normalization of Deviance.

This is exactly how almost all bad things and behaviors are able to exist. Not because people think bad things are good, even the worst tyrants dislike tyranny, but because the incentives of the environment make them the right choice for the person in the moment.