Sure feels like those "Don't be evil" days are long gone.
-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The simple truth is that most people do not pursue evil as a goal, but are opportunistic: they take the easiest solution that won't harm them personally. If we're serious about building a better world, reducing opportunities to be evil is what we should be focusing on. Not raising our hands and acting like there's nothing to be done about it.
Is that so hard? We do it with pets, children, even ourselves, (ice cream after work). But writ large we just say "Nope, they're evil, let's <extreme action>"
When your business depends almost entirely on ads, you have to do anything you can to keep from losing revenue from ads and that results in screwing anyone and everyone and hoping your size makes it impossible to lose if it gets out.
It's not because of the ads. Plenty of business relied on ads for very long times in the past without going evil. They are evil because they want the profits.
I agree with that that assertion. I think the current marketing trends are very exploitative and highly misused. Marketing tools like Google, Facebook and Twitter (marketing tools in that their main goal is to take Ads to certain demographics) give advertisers incentives for bad behavior .
[1] https://youtu.be/dOMJF1_bJCo?t=456 (you can turn on CC auto translate into English.
marketing, at its core, is bringing to market a useful product or service and exchanging it with others who find it more valuable than the cost. this core is net-positive, but on top of that is plenty of leeway to create net-negatives.
we have norms and shared ethics for a reason (to rein in negatives & benefit from positives).
Imagine if their motto was "Don't cut the testicles off our male employees." Like, er, sure, obviously. Wait, what? Was that a possibility?
I saw someone here put it in the context of a life cycle, and that rhymes with reality to me.