Huh I don’t know. Maybe the $200k salary for entry level developers is exciting? Or maybe it’s the ability to work on a product that is a household name for billions of people?
Maybe it's because I don't live in an SV or other techie bubble that I see this, that I give more credit to the average person. Because I'm not stuck I'm an echo chamber of "general public are naive and don't care". They do care, they are more aware of some of these issues than you think. Assuming the only people who care or think about these issues are techies is an extremely condescending & patronizing view towards the average person.
Perhaps it helps broaden my view that live in a densely populated but not very techie/tech-company area and I have a large social circle of non techies. It shows me that your so-called bubble where hn/sv/techies make sweeping generalizations about the average person is often based in stereotypical fiction instead of reality. My age 65+ parents and in-laws couldn't tell you the difference between tcp & udp, setup a WiFi router, or understand the difference between a spreadsheet and a database or know what Full Stack means. But they have opinions on Facebook, and they aren't good. My few dozen coworkers of all ages are the same.
Your own self-satisfied bubble of congratulatory "we techies are special and have a special perspective" bubble is blinding you. Ask anyone with a moderate interest in politics how they feel about facebook and the answer is mostly going to be "not great".
Most don't care enough to quit facebook, but as per the point of my original comment, facebook isn't going to have any sort of easy time whipping up public support against Apple for privacy issues they mostly don't care about one way or another.
They also have some amount of good they do.
Despite Facebooks evil, there is good that comes out of it.
Also, OSS tech that's in service to ad tech may still not be enticing. Even if it's not directly used for ad tech, everything you would do for facebook would ultimately be for the purpose of ad tech. Rationalizing that your particular work has non ad-tech related applications seems like just that: a rationalization. Other companies offer OSS work opportunities, as well as the opportunity to carve out, say, 5-10 hours a month to the project of your choice regardless of your day job.
I'm not coming down on one side or the other of such a moral choice. I don't think things are that simple. I think it's a spectrum, and people should weight these things when making a decision, if they have the luxury of doing so.
And I have to say, at this point ad tech is probably only one of a few major problems with Facebook content. News feeds, memes, etc. that are rewarded with shared & likes for being the most inflammatory/emotionally manipulative are at this point at least as bad as micro-targeting of ads, and I personally think are much much worse.