Just yesterday, Facebook started including in-stream ads for Creation Research. I'm a scientist who's work on evolution. i also see several other ridiculous ads that have no relevance to me.
I think it's more likely the folks running the product machine learning recommendation engines are asleep at the wheel; after all, Mark lost interest in his core product to promote AR, so why would th efolks running the core product care?
Eh, that seems pretty relevant: the ads are about evolution, you work on evolution related stuff. It's just the ad targeting engine doesn't understand that you're going to fundamentally disagree with the concept being advertised. That's probably an edge case though. 99% of the time irrelevance for advertising means you just have no need for the product being advertised, not that it's the polar opposite of your worldview. You probably don't remember the ones that are merely useless, though.
I do expect that recommendation engines should pick up on, and not show me, advertising content that is fundamentally nonscientific (and show those ads to other folks whose profiles are more consistent). It demonstrates that the recommendation algorithm can't differentiate between two clusters that use similar words, but different concept vectors.
Well, you don't know how it was targeted. Maybe they don't want to sing to the choir so such ads might be targeted at people who are interested in evolution. Still it seems unlikely that the scientific-ness of something can be determined by an AI model at all, let alone just word vectors. What is and isn't science can be hard to rigorously pin down, that's why pseudoscience is problematic in the first place.
These are all reasonable points, but since I have lots of experience building recommendation systems at places like google, I have a pretty good understanding of what the embeddings are capable of learning (even so, Google News still does the same thing occasionally).
I think it's more likely the folks running the product machine learning recommendation engines are asleep at the wheel; after all, Mark lost interest in his core product to promote AR, so why would th efolks running the core product care?