One thing the internet does which is super incompatible with how people deal with information is that it amplifies anecdotes and selection bias. If you were ju

One thing the internet does which is super incompatible with how people deal with information is that it amplifies anecdotes and selection bias. If you were just talking to a sample including a small fraction of your friends and acquaintances, and you found that like 10 of them had noticed that Facebook seemed to be showing ads based on their conversations, that would be compelling evidence that something was up. And since for the vast majority of human history, that was the kind of information you had access to, that's the way we tend to process things. But now you can go online and mention this weird thing that happened to you, and a thousand other people will all see it. Suddenly you have super high odds of a "cold hit", even though the phenomenon was purely random. And to make matters worse, it's not purely random. Facebook has algorithms that are trying, often successfully, to model your life based on the information you give it. So the chances of "eery" ad targeting are significantly higher than if it were just random. I think we're going to see this kind of conspiracy theory more and more as time goes on, and we need to figure out cultural tools to counteract this problem.