It does set a potentially dangerous precedent, but with how things are going (American newspapers declining in quality and SCOTUS selectively ignoring precedent and doing whatever), you’re right that it doesn’t mean much.
withholding law Did you mean upholding?
I doubt those people even know they work for Meta. They probably work at an agency which does this for multiple services, not only Facebook and they probably have that job because they can’t get a better one. It isn’t even unheard of for this to be done by kidnapped people in captivity. Sending provoking material doesn’t do anything meaningful other than make those peoples’ day worse, and chances are it’s already pretty close to hell on earth.
The only way I can see them weaseling out of this is by keeping the program running the model made in-house and proprietary while releasing the model in a format unusable without the base (proprietary) program. But maybe the GPL forbids such obfuscstion efforts (I don’t know, I haven’t studied it in detail)