[benmmurphy]

The 14/88 miners have so many degrees of freedom in how they search for these numbers they are always guaranteed to find them. If the number of banned ads was < 88 we would be hearing about how some subset of similar looking ads had size 88.

[guerrilla]

Hardly. It's 14 words, not 14 anything else. Furthemore, neo-Nazis have in fact also used these numbers in their esoteric numerology in varying degrees of freedom.

[leereeves]

It's 14 words, in the same way that "And if you check out some of her other tweets on this, such as" is 14 words. And where is the proof that there were 88 versions of this ad? The Media Matters article has a link "ran 88 ads" that points to [1], but there are only 3 ads on that page.

This "evidence" is a Rorschach test. People see what they're predisposed to see.

1: https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3878791

[anigbrowl]

If you look at the picture of the 3 ads, each has a number in the top left corner showing how many times it ran, apparently generated by the Dewey Square Adwatch tool set cited in the article. The numbers are 30, 28 and 30, which sum to 88. This could have been better explained in the MM article. It could also be a coincidence, but repeated coincidences eventually qualify as a pattern.

[leereeves]

So the ad had run 88 times when Media Matters took the screenshot?

Then if it had continued to run, wouldn't it have run more than 88 times? Or possibly it did run again before Facebook took it down, and actually did run more than 88 times?

Now I'm picturing Media Matters watching the ad counter like teenage boys watching an odometer approach 80085.

[ceejayoz]

It’s not an impressions count.

[leereeves]

Of course not. The article doesn't specify what is being counted, but Media Matters was clearly counting something.

And like any counter, it's bound to pass 88 on the way to however many versions/targetings/updates/campaigns/whatever the campaign had planned to run.

[at_a_remove]

It's like numerology at some point, or that movie The Number 23.

[anigbrowl]

Then it should be easy to demonstrate using some indisputably innocuous control group. Have at it.