Your example is meaningless because the article doesn't make any kind of argument for that situation. It suggests that those filters should be more difficult to

Your example is meaningless because the article doesn't make any kind of argument for that situation. It suggests that those filters should be more difficult to use, or completely absent - but not that they should be present and ignored. This also wasn't the direction of your original objection against "data manipulation, user interface decisions, hiding of opinions". More generally, the article doesn't agree with your general idea that "what they like" is a well-defined concept, or that a platform is able to get a good idea of what it is. Giving a user the power to search for specific preferences doesn't mean that a platform will be able to return the best results for that user - just the results that have been searched for. What that means for the authors is that a preference search isn't necessary or meaningful to have.