Yeah, I've built ad systems. Sometimes I'd give a presentation to some other department of programmers who worked on content, and someone would ask the tense question: Not to be rude, but aren't ads bad?

And I'd promptly say: Ads are propaganda, and a security risk because it executes 3rd party code on your machine. All of us run adblockers.

There was no need for me to point out that ads are also their revenue generator. They just had a burning moral question before they proceeded to interop with the propaganda delivery system, I guess.

It would lead to unnecessary cognitive dissonance to convince myself of some dumb ideology to make me feel better about wasting so much of my one (1) known life, so I just take the hit and be honest about it. The moral question is what I do about it, if I intervene effectively to help dismantle such systems and replace them with something better.