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The fact that some people receive badly targeted ads isn't a prove for the surveillance system not working.

The question regarding ads is how well targeted campaigns are being paid for. But the ad space is relatively harmless.

It becomes relevant when not talking about ads, but surpression of citizens by state actors. If the data is being used to identified potential targets for some measures. These measures can involve drawing election districts, deciding where to build the sewage plant or library or where search for people to deport and how to influence them in political campaigns. Some margin of error has varying impact there, but it can help a lot to reduce manual selection by a lot.

I try to disable a lot of web tracking stuff, so I kinda understand if advertisers have trouble targeting me. But the information they should be able to use to target me just isn't getting used at all. Are other people getting well-targeted ads? because in my experience, ad companies suck at it.

I constantly receive ads on Youtube in languages I don't speak. I can kinda make out whats happening in some of the ads, I know a bit of Spanish for instance. But the ads entirely in Turkish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc, are completely lost on me. I often cannot even tell what the product is that they are advertising. My google account has language preferences set, my browser has them set, my device has them set. Google should *know* what languages I can speak. I'm not on a VPN, I'm pretty sure google knows my exact location. None of these languages are spoken particularly frequently in my area, I don't understand how I'm getting advertisements in these languages.

I used to have targeted advertisements turned off on youtube. I changed this several months ago, because the ads were literally 100% scams, deepfakes, and illegal products. I just got sick of it. I've intentionally turned on targeted ads, as it lets you have some control over the advertisements. Now I finally no longer get as many ads for pornography and illegal drugs, but its still mostly scams, and I still constantly receive ads that are completely and wildly outside of my demographic. Languages I can't speak, political ads for companies and politicians hundreds of miles away. I am shocked when i rarely receive an ad for a local restaurant or business, because it happens so incredibly rarely. When it happens, I wonder, did they actually target me to show me the local business? or was it luck? I'm convinced its the latter.

> Now I finally no longer get as many ads for pornography and illegal drugs

Always fun when the ads have less rigorous content policy enforcement than the actual videos.

I occasionally use non-adblocked youtube, and I think the ads were mostly Audible/Jet2 holidays? I don't think I've ever seen a local business ad on there, presumably because making a video ad in the first place is expensive.

The places for local businesses seem to be Facebook and Instagram.

They are rare but I have seen ads for local businesses in a 100,000 person market.

Given how much you can spend on text or banner ads I don't think the cost of producing a video ad is prohibitive these days, particularly when it can be a voiceover + graphics + text, it's not like you have to hire 15 union members to do it the way they do in L.A. Even back in the late 1990s it was a well kept secret that ads on local cable were a good deal compared to newspapers and radio.

10% of meta earnings last year were from scammers using their AI on meta users through ads. It doesn't make sense that they are allowing it, except it is making them billions. So what if millions of americans lose everything? Shareholder algo bots like the way it looks

> all i see is retargeted ads for stuff I already bought.

IMO, nothing exposes the folly behind targeted ads as much as this.

I have come to believe, based on little other than my limited experience, that the targeting does not matter.

Facebook provides users with virtual crack. User pays for the high with attention. This attention is sold off to the highest bidder.

The contents of the ad is irrelevant, the data harvested is used to make the crack ever more potent.

I used to report scams to facebook, but they deny my claim and say the ads are fine. Seems like fake AI videos of celebrities/politicians asking you to invest in alt-coins is A-OK in facebooks... book.

It's infuriating.

To their credit I did get this message from them today:

    We reviewed the ad you reported and found that it goes against 
    our Advertising Standards. We let the advertiser know that we 
    removed the ad, but not who reported it.

    Thank you for letting us know. Reports like yours help us to 
    improve the integrity and relevance of advertising on Facebook.

But mine was an absolutely open and shut case.

Ads on the FB & goog network (this includes phys.org btw) are NOT paper tigers, in the sense that

  they are a reliable anti-signal

(to short, not to buy, to look at rising competitors, to look into reasons why a product might be failing, to sus out the lack of foresight in their investors, to extract other high cost channels/signals that they are still using ntless

As an example of the last one, I just learnt about an ISO standard.. )

YMMV depending on how much the network knows [it doesn't know] about you ofc ;)

Well you do know YOShInOn and I frequently find an article on phys.org that we think is interesting but will substitute a link to the paper that is referenced if it is open access. I respect their selection of topics and articles and, looking at alternatives, frequently their article on the topic is really the best. But damn their ads are awful. It's a conversation I have with them and sometimes with their advertisers ("did you know the adversarial design of that site made me click on your ad by mistake and wasted your spend?")

Maybe I should draw a firmer line for some of my values but in terms of my other values ScienceX is the best popular science publisher today by far. (compare Universe Today or Scientific American.)