It's far scarier than you have considered. Is it going to ruin you as a person? No, but it creates an incentive structure which is warped. Consider media (news

It's far scarier than you have considered. Is it going to ruin you as a person? No, but it creates an incentive structure which is warped. Consider media (news or otherwise). If ads are how dollars are made then quality, and accuracy, is only important in so far as it serves as a vehicle for bringing in eyeballs. Consider 3 different examples of content. The first is expensive to make but high quality and people value it highly, they consider it extremely important. The second is inexpensive to make and low quality, people don't care about it much if at all. The third is also inexpensive and low quality but people generally dislike it. The important thing to understand here is that ads incentivize the 2nd and 3rd types of content over the first. When people pay for their content directly they will pay more for higher quality and more important content (if they are able). When content is just a vehicle for advertising it's much easier to turn a profit on content that is easy to produce and yet has a mass appeal (clickbait, humor, tabloids). And, as we see, that's the sort of thing that becomes plentiful easily today. Stuff that takes a lot of work to get right struggles while stuff that is trivial and salacious blooms. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.