it’s one thing to convince you to buy something and it’s an entirely different thing to condition to you accept that genocides are necessary sometimes; vote against your own interests or else the other team will win; propagandize you against foreign political enemies; distract you from global rings of oligarchical pedofiles who torture, rape, kill and eat children for funsies; and many other things.

like, i see what you mean but i'm afraid that modern society doesn't see it that way. "moral relativism" (a.k.a. post-structuralism) states that there is no absolute truth, neither is there an absolute set of ethics; and as a consequence, it must be possible to negotiate these ethics on the "free market of ideas", a.k.a the internet where big influencer institutions pay to sway your opinion. It's all just a market game: Buy and sell opinions, and see which ones perform best as a consequence.