I’m sure the the op knows this. The point that was made is that the article’s title stated that FB staff is using that term to describe children. The article doesn’t actually support the claim it makes in the title.
I’m not sure I agree it’s less of a scandal in that case.
If you’re dealing with a service that could potentially psychologically manipulate children, it’s on you to go the extra mile to separate metrics or risk factors related to that possibility and distinguish it from a lumped population.
If Facebook internally referred to high spenders as “whales” in an aggregate manner, and had not already done due diligence to distinguish & guard against this being applied to young children, that’s already maximally severe. Had they gone even further and intentionally applied the term to children, it would just be maximally severe from an ethical standpoint rather than an incompetence / negligence standpoint.
Through, given context it is less of scandal.