I strongly believe the worst vices of social media would all persist if there were zero advertising.

You can see that by looking at more minor or fringe social media sites. Public "liking" is literally all it takes for people to degenerate into performativeness, sensationalism, grandstanding, misinformation, etc.

I find it sad that intelligent, educated people can be so blind to the evils building around them. How they confuse the opportunity for a right and how they take and accept awful as normal because they were raised without understanding what they never had...

To associate contextual advertising based on large scale demographics and location with spying, lying, cheating and thieving at an individual level, is a great example of this in real life.

In the old days, the tabloids were obvious. The sensationalism was easy to identify and passive in its voice. They sat on the end caps of grocery stores, far away from the News. TV news was regulated and there was a strict ethics code in place. Today, all news is tabloid as they all chase attention. They have all become the Weekly World News and as a result, we have clowns and ignoramuses running things.

And people fell for it. They actually fell for it...and continue to fall for it.

That is why it's a cancer. Ad tech eats everything in its path and destroys everything good in the process.

When you cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction, you have lost the plot.