For social it’s key to communicate with others, so as long as you use it you kind of have to be where everybody is, and everybody is where the free stuff is. If you can’t easily leave and continue communicating, because the platform attracts advertisers by the number of figurative eyeballs so it’s not in their interest to let yours go, then you can’t vote with your wallet unless you make yourself an outcast, which humans—extremely social beings—tend to find extremely stressful, which makes it is not really in their best interest no matter their media and marketing literacy.

On the other hand, even if you do make this difficult near-suicide move and leave, you have hardly anywhere to go: because of this phenomenon, any honest competition where you can pay for better service that works in your interest and has actual customer support (remember when that was a thing?) has no chance. All viable competition remains mostly free to use—we have been conditioned that it’s got to be free, but of course if neither users nor advertisers are paying then no one can really demand things that we take for granted from commercial services (like uptime, availability, well-supported convenient clients and so on), and the amount of resources that goes into development and support of these services is much smaller and much less coordinated.

With non-social ad-supported products it’s not as bad, at least in terms of lock-in. I personally would prefer a paid app from a somewhat reputable developer than risk installing a tracking machine from a shady SDK. However, still, most people default to free, and if platform fee is reduced and that honest app costs slightly less but is still not free, will it make any perceptible difference? I doubt it (maybe you’re right, most people lack media/marketing literacy, they can see that with free their economic utility per dollar approaches infinity and are unaware or not concerned about the intangible damage, including to the ecosystem of developers who try to make an honest living) and so I think ad/data mining based model should be fought on another level.

The problem is companies/marketers who won't take no for an answer... And unfortunately, short of reverse monetization, (marketers must pay individuals for our eyeballs, which has its own logistical problems), there isn't a way to really prevent the pathological impression pipeline that advertising has gravitated toward. In the U.S. unfortunately, there is zero we can do to corral mercantile speech short of collectively coordinated action by the populace since we've written the capability out of our governmental edifice.