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From the very beginning of the Internet, ads ran everything. They were a natural step from newspapers as that's how the papers subsidized much of their material, and it's the same story with the web. Running a server costs time and money and becomes more expensive the more visitors it gets. On its face, advertisements are a good thing because they provide money to sites to allow users to enjoy the content for free.

Advertisements appear to be fairly innocuous too as there's nothing inheritly wrong with attempting to connect product to customer.

There's nothing nefarious per se, simply pofit motives, but as a side effect, it diminishes open and thoughtful discourse and creates silos of ideas, which the internet was supposed to override, not entrench.

Here's how it happens: a website, like CNN for example, wishes to show some form of content like an article, but requires money to pay for the server to run it. CNN then shows ads that other companies will pay for, so CNN is able to serve the article (and the ads) free of charge to the end user. After doing that for a while, CNN (et al) realized that companies would be willing to pay more for more targeted advertising (that is, ads that are shown specifically to people who would be more willing to buy whatever it is being advertised - this is what you see when, for example, you looked for a car, then see ads for that car everywhere afterwards), and so from a purely business perspective, user tracking (stalking) is born. Not to be satisfied, CNN (et al) realized that user engagement (addiction) leads to more ad clicks, which means more revenue for them. So in the interest of increasing revenue, they create a "feed" which is info shown to the user that, rather than being sorted by time, is sorted by how likely the user is going to interact with it. People generally will interact more with something infuriating or annoying, than something acceptable, so this has two effects: first is that it puts the user in an emotional state, meaning they will be less likely to think rationally (and more likely to click ads), and second that it will likely lead to the user seeking less annoying content, meaning content that they agree with. The former is the desired effect from CNN (et al), but the latter is inseperable and is is a large part of what leads to echo chambers. Echo chambers are polarizing by their very nature; if all you ever hear are yes-men, then you will never know if your views are right or wrong. When an indivdual becomes so entrenched in their views, then it can easily lead to a shoot first, ask questions later attitude, which is exactly what we see in proxy discourse (such as online or in politics; heavy polarization).

Okay, so to summarize that process: company A wants money -> company B fronts money to A to serve ads -> company B pays more for company A to target ads better -> company A targets by tracking and serving content to get the user in an aggitated state -> user adjusts by attempting to eliminate irritants, creating an echo chamber -> user becomes entrenched in their point of view -> user's ideology spills into the real world affecting policy, social dynamics, and more.

Echo chambers are not the end goal, but they are a direct result of seeking profit from targeted ads and collection of user data.

It's a tall order to love thy neighbor, especially when their views on life may be completely bass ackwards from your own, but at the very least it'd be good to take a more objective view and, before judging, attempt to understand why they believe what they do, then judge the reasons rather than the product. If even that seems too difficult, then abstaining from social media and news for a time might be a smart idea.

This is a collective effort, so simply attempting to change yourself is only part of the battle, future defense and prevention are also important. Easy steps now for an individual to take are abstaining from social media and news temporarily (or limiting their consumption in general), and look into creating a personal website that isn't subjected to being hijacked by ads and manipulation to the same degree as centralized platforms.

Additionally, deincentivizing ad traffic is another more ambitious goal.

From a technical standpoint, every time you load a website there is a transaction that occurs. With the ad model, it's your attention and data (eg location, articles read, and so much more (it's actually terrifying)), in exchange for whatever you wanted to see (a recipe, friend, video, etc).

So the goal is to provide a transaction for the company serving the content without monetizing the user by hijacking their attention and stealing their data.

The question I leave then is what does the user have to offer to the transaction that doesn't detract from society?