instinctive needs to connect and interact with other people, to gain new experiences/information and be entertained, that kind of things. People will just seek it out elsewhere if not on Facebook.
By this logic, we should be fine with shutting down Facebook. We'll simply go somewhere else. Fine with me, maybe it'll also serve as a lesson in greed.
Well I mean it's no more of a defense of Facebook than of a liquor store or whatever. But I don't follow your logic. If you shut down the restaurant on the corner here I will go somewhere else too. Doesn't mean I'm necessarily fine with people granting themselves the right to shut places down.
The users are not the customers.
The subject of this story is both a user and a customer. But apart from cases (like this one) where the advertising is for political campaigns, the goal of advertisers is to sell products to facebook's users. So instead of being customers of Facebook, they are customers of Facebook's customers. The money trail simply has an extra step in the middle. There are surely be some nuanced differences in that more-complex relationship, but overall the motivation for facebook is the same as if they were trying to sell their own products directly to users, which presumably they do sometimes also. Though they probably have to deal with a higher risk of antitrust accusations when they operate that way.