It defeats the purpose if you don't see the ad. Even if you don't plan on clicking on it, seeing it will build awareness of the product or service. That awareness could translate into a sale somewhere down the line (eg. someone tells you about a problem they have and you say "hey I saw an ad for a product that tackles that").
I deliberately don't look at the ads. If one manages to slip itself into my view, I take it as a personal offense. Meaning that if your precious ad manages to "build an awareness", it's the awareness you don't actually want as it's attached to a negative emotion.
So tell me again what's the purpose of forcing an ad down my throat, an action that is guaranteed to piss me off?
I'd be OK with something more subtle, like a mandatory FB account (kind of like how Google does with G+ and their other services). But limiting what they can see on the internet...I wouldn't go so far as to call it unethical, but certainly deplorable. Especially for a company with as much capital as FB. They don't need to sink this low.
Some feature ideas they should have tried: real time locations of friends/family (ala Google Latitude), integration with something like Angie's list, integration with something like gasbuddy.com, pull in data from Google Now (be like Google Now but I see it on a map).
^Plato's philosopher kings. Ignorant folks aren't qualified to decide policy and hence should have no impact on it. I agree to an extant - there needs to be some sort of minimal qualification for elected representatives. Not sure how that would work practically.
It seems like a flaw with Capitalism. In it's pure form, it leads to extremely wide wealth gaps. If history repeats itself, and conditions worsen, perhaps we'll see a repeat of the robber baron era which would then, as it did in the past, lead into an strong socialist reaction (unions and social welfare programs). Feels like a cycle.
