OK, I’ll bite, then what is it?

These externalities include death of traditional media, extreme levels of political polarization, and climbing suicide rate of teenagers, girls in particular. These things are caused in very large part by the big tech companies maximizing consumption of ads, and efficiency of ads targeting.

Well if adverting is so bad, and old media relied on advertising, Tech was doing the world a favor by starving them out.

We should be thanking Google for exposing the corruption that was the old media advertising empire

Google didn't expose the corruption of old media, rather it supplanted it with even deeper and more insidious corruption.

The problem isn’t the ads. The problem is the ad targeting.

But they (and the rest of the industry) have replaced it with an even more egregious and abusive advertising system.

Google gets no thanks from me.

Every single other type of advertising requires your explicit consent. YouTube? Google? Newspapers? All have your consent.

I can’t avoid billboards. But I can trivially avoid FB/Google/YT etc.

I can also use things like uBlock.

The internet is open and inherently client focused. That’s a huge feature. We’re ultimately in control.

News reports, announcements, updates, etc are often announced and hosted on social media and YouTube. The main news outlets hardly host their own video, and half the useful announcements got made on Twitter first (before Musk torched it lol), so unless “remain deliberately ignorant” is the alternative - which I don’t think it is, then the reality is that you end up on one of these tech giants real quick.

How exactly do they have that "consent"?

There is advertising in public washrooms, there is advertising on people's clothing, there is advertising playing on PA systems, there is advertising embedded in movies, there is advertising presented as news. There is nonconsenting advertising everywhere. In my experience, more of it is nonconsenting than consenting -- probably because very few people would actually consent to it.

Advertising is itself always balancing on the tradeoff between disgruntling the consumer and the benefit the consumer gets from the media/tool they're actually trying to engage with. It's an implicit bargain for most people, not an explicit one.

For me, advertising crossed that line a long time ago. If I had to watch the amount of ads YouTube actually puts in front of you, I wouldn't use it. Thank goodness for ad blockers.

By all properties, it is a product.