Thank you for pointing this connection out. It always felt a bit gross that an advertising company was leading the lobbying campaign given the industry's massive damage to teenagers mental health over the decades.
I blogged about this connection a year ago, glad to see at least one article published way too late. The Murdoch papers had their own 'let them be kids' campaign with identical talking points, and Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation also contributed.
What's weird to me is that this advertising company simply lobbied directly for what they wanted both to politicians and the public. Normally as the article mentions you'd have a cover group that's the face of movement to obscure the true intentions. God Aussie journalists are crap.
The only 'line go up' graph they have left is money invested. I'm even dubious of the questions answered graph. It looks more like a feature added to internal wiki that went up in usage. Instead it's portrayed as a measure of quality or usefulness.
The article makes them look psychopathic. Underpaying staff, layoffs, constant churn and providing poor services is 'not a flaw' and 'makes sense' because they boost profits.
This was always my pet peeve when working as a penetration tester. We'd run simple tools like this to cover the basics, but so many coworkers would blindly copy paste the issues without considering the site's context and suitability. Not to knock their skills, they'd find real vulnerabilities too. It's just that this stuff was considered beneath them, while I felt that giving a client tailored advice on little details like this is what they were looking for and shows attention to detail.
I feel you can apply this to all roles. When models passed highschool exam benchmarks, some people talked as if that made the model equivalent to a person passing highschool. I may be wrong, but I bet even an state of the art LLM couldn't complete high school. You have to do things like attending classes at the right time/place, take initiative, keep track of different classes. All of the bigger picture thinking and soft skills that aren't in a pure exam.
Improving this is what everyone's looking into now. Even larger models, context windows, adding reasoning, or something else might improve this one day.