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.
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).
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.