[disgruntledphd2]

> So long as Google and Facebook put the advertisers in control of who sees their advertising, any assertion that the system is designed to serve us is bullshit

But they don't put advertisers in control of who sees their ads.

If you look at audience sizes on FB, and then run some direct response ads on that audience, you'll notice that you only ever reach maybe 10% of that audience.

This is because what FB/Goog are good at is figuring out which ads are likely to get someone to click and/or convert, and show only those ads.

The dirty secret is that those people might have converted anyway.

One can measure this with an attribution model, but the trouble is that the two biggest players Google and Facebook have very little incentive to co-operate, so all attribution models are extremely biased.

tl;dr the advertisers set boundaries on who should see the ad, but they don't control who the ads get served to.