Disclaimer: I work at Google. Facebook is far from being the first company to have these criticisms leveled at them, and it won't be the last. There are peopl

Disclaimer: I work at Google. Facebook is far from being the first company to have these criticisms leveled at them, and it won't be the last. There are people who work at Facebook and Google who care about having a free and open web. That's how you get the Open Graph Protocol, Download Your Info, GMail Email Markup, and Google Takeout. But living in a free and open web is really something only hetero white men can do. Virtually anyone else (women, lesbian/gay/bi/trans, ethnic minorities) needs tools to protect their privacy and manage/block/prevent harassment at scale. Ads are a way of paying engineers' salaries. Many ads suck, and one way to help make the world a better place is to work on weeding out the bad ones (the ones that install malware) or making it easier to create good ones. The good ads are the ones that are relevant, that inform, entertain, and make you feel good. Heck, I'd argue that half the articles on the front page of HN on any given day are native ads that serve this purpose.