Something I have pointed out to others in the past, and on here too, is that the Internet existed just fine before all these ad-related sites appeared. Of course, nothing on the scale of FB, Google etc, but I'd argue that we're worse off now than before.
When you rely on advertising you then have to make sure that every piece of content works towards making the advertising worthwhile. You then maximise SEO, and clicks and focus on metrics and bullshit like engagement (whatever that means).
You have to calculate whether a blog post or article is worth doing because your sponsors now care about that: you stop making content for the love/joy/sake of the content and everything becomes bait for your ads.
20 years ago, the only ads were about punching a monkey and finding out that I was the 1 millionth visitor to a website and could click the ad to claim my prize :)
There should be more transparency around how ads are displayed on the internet.. but giving researchers full access to a user’s data and their friend’s data is a pretty poor one. Can’t a better system be designed for this?
Content, however, is very dangerous and it’s not clear what a good solution is. It’s not clear what the purpose of content is on the internet.