Comment by disgruntledphd2

Full disclosure: I worked at Facebook from 2013 to 2018, almost entirely on ads.

Like, you may not want to hear this, but lots of SMBs get value from targeted ads, and this has lead to lots and lots of successful businesses.

I encourage my wife to use these kinds of ads (mostly on TikTok and IG these days) for her business, and they work reasonably well.

That's not to say that Facebook hasn't had a bunch of bad impacts on the world (Myanmar and other poorer countries come to mind), but the OP's point is a good one, and lots of people who don't work at Meta believe this.

Ultimately, Facebook provide a service that it appears lots of people like (I do use Whatsapp but not really the rest of them) and it's not up to you to determine whether or not they've been good or bad for society.

As I keep bringing up in these discussions, should we ban radios for their role in the Rwandan genocide?

Changing forms of communication are always going to cause societal changes, and we're currently living through the biggest one since the invention of the printing press.

I'm not sure one can blame just one company for all of this, and honestly if you had to pick one I'd probably pick Google for making it profitable to write garbage and monetise through ads (but as I said, the Internet and computer mediated communication are a huge change and it's basically impossible to say what actually drove the changes).