[eeegnu]

> The myth persists because coincidences will happen in high numbers at scale. If hundreds of millions of people are spending hours on social media each week, some number of them will see ads related to some conversation they had recently by pure random chance.

It's certainly more frequent than just by random chance, but by virtue of the fact that we say many things, and the things we will say can be predicted (at least to some extent), by our browsing history, which already is constantly being churned through however many ML algorithms to know what ads will be relevant to us. I'm also convinced location data is thrown in there too; after I recently started spending more time in a new area, I stared getting ads for one of the adult braces companies that I've only ever seen there a block away. In those cases there's a decent probability someone will mention it because it's new to them, only for the algorithms to also figure: 'this is probably the kind of person that would be interested in this, and they're nearby now!' It happens frequently enough to almost everyone I know that the random argument loses its credibility to me.