As an ex-employee, I can’t say that I’m surprised. It’s never really subtle, too.
Antonio G-M (the author of _Chaos Monkey_ where he details his experience as the PM who started Custom audiences) joked today on twitter that Advertising has some bogger bodies buried. I’m not sure: when he left Custom Audience and related programs were a bit of a Far West. Most issues were rapidly addressed, some more recently. “Why am I seeing this”, facebook.com/ads/preferences and the more recent ad transparency for political campaigns show more integrity than anyone else.
I believe that Facebook could be (statically) profitable without the Growth tactics exposed here. The company was based on the express idea that they will be replaced soon, in a race, which makes slow expansion unacceptable. It was true up until recently, but I don’t think that it still is.
That's because some news organizations have invested in bringing Facebook down. If you pay attention, you'll notice those same organizations have also tested the waters with Google and Amazon, and to a lesser extent, other SV companies and the SV community itself.
I barely ever use FB. I really don't care what happens to the webapp (although I do very much appreciate the open source tools they've built, such as react and pyTorch). But I am concerned that these media companies are attacking the tech community, and are basically opposed to any platform that circumvents their role as gatekeepers of information.