Okay, I have one of those anecdotes too. I'll preface this with the acknowledgement that I'm a middle-aged man in a typical Viagra demographic, although I am s

Okay, I have one of those anecdotes too. I'll preface this with the acknowledgement that I'm a middle-aged man in a typical Viagra demographic, although I am single and not sexually active, which any algorithm should know. On this day, I had never seen a FB ad for Viagra. I was on Facebook one day and became rather frustrated with how clogged my feed was, lots of irrelevant stuff in there, including ads that weren't well-targeted. And I was also logged into my friend's MUD, which supports no encryption at all, and so I ranted a while about Facebook and advertising, and then I said something like "who knows, the next thing I see could be a Viagra ad!" Then seconds later, I scrolled down on Facebook and was treated to a Viagra ad. It was hilarious, and I couldn't ignore the happenstance of that. The only plausible way this could've happened is if my ISP is siphoning off text from any unencrypted connection and selling keywords in realtime to Meta? More realistically, I suppose, my number was just up, and that ad was going to be served no matter what I said on a MUD. I did actually try to trigger the algorithm by asking the MUD if anyone knew some tasteful window treatments I could purchase, but I couldn't elicit any ads for window treatments from anywhere.