Note - gun sales are very strong in the US. Antifa / BLM / Armed protestors.
I think that's exactly what FB is doing, to be honest. They are simply letting third party advertisers advertise.
Historically, dem president in power has always been an indicator of increased spending on guns (because hardcore gun people become afraid that the dems will make guns more difficult to purchase, so they stock up). And increase in gun sales means increased budget (including ad budget) for gun-related businesses. Higher ad budget for gun-related businesses means more ads for gun-related businesses popping up on everyone's feed, as they keep outbidding other ads.
Combine that with the fact that a lot more people in your social network graph became more interested in guns for various reasons over the past year (protests on both sides, covid, dem president, etc.), and you have just massively increased the probability of seeing an ad for a gun-related business.
I don't think it's quite that simple. Facebook controls the juxtaposition of ads with content, and with each other. This can reinforce the power of the individual ads, or attenuate it. In this case, it's pretty clearly creating a "caravan" of ads because that's more effective than letting each stand alone.
Disclaimer: I used to work at Facebook, but I was in storage. It gave me no particular insight into how the ad system works. This is just based on general knowledge of how human psychology and ML work.
Oh, totally agreed on this one. FB fully controls the layout and where ads are displayed. When I said that FB doesn't control things, I meant that they don't control and decide which ads get shown to you, it is all down to what advertisers advertise, and whether you fall under those specific target audiences.
I think Facebook is awful, but this how their business works. I can't see them going out of their way to not serve their customers and not make money, outside of public outcry or government regulation forcing them to.
I'm not sure GP is suggesting anything, and I know I'm not. These are just observations about how things actually work. The fact that certain groups of users get "bombarded" with ads for certain categories does not indicate intent or interference, as some here have suggested. It just means the system is doing what it's designed to do, which is to optimize the effectiveness and efficiency of serving billions of ads to billions of people.
The specifics I mentioned are not something that I am proposing as a target for a change, because, as you said, this is how their ad business works, and it seems pretty fair.
What I mean is that this is the predictable and proven behavior of Facebook, so is this a target for change now that we don't like this particular result? Or should Facebook be somehow regulated to prevent this type of behavior generally?
So I really wonder if republicans are scared when a democrat is in office and subsequently buy guns because of that or whether they are scared into buying more guns by mere marketing.
A lot of people who own guns also collect them. It is kind of a hobby. Guns might not be advancing, but people like having multiple different kinds, swap attachments, get some rare handgun from WW2 era from Czechoslovakia, etc.
Plus, it isn't all just about guns themselves. A lot of it is in the adjacent stuff, like ammo (which inevitably runs out, if you go to a gun range on a regular basis).
I prefer to think of it similarly to an audio gear enthusiast hobby. How many headphones/amps/synths/keyboards/guitars/etc. one might need? People spend enormous amounts of money on audio gear for decades, without actually "needing" most of it, and it isn't like the actual acoustics or technology in audio changes that much (with exception of a few specific categories, like midi controllers).
>So I really wonder if republicans are scared when a democrat is in office and subsequently buy guns because of that or whether they are scared into buying more guns by mere marketing.
I don't know about you, but I have plenty of politically left-leaning friends who bought their first firearms this year. So, I think, covid and protests are, at least partially, definitely fueling that increase in sales all across the political spectrum.
Ours for sure arent.
Locally there may be also a sense that at least in some jurisdictions policing has decreased and/or crime has increased - ie, you are more on your own now - faith in govt is maybe a bit diminished.
And now of course some of the right wing protestors are showing up heavily armed - but I think they always bought guns because they often seem like gun nuts.