Not withstanding that I can’t edit my advertising preferences on Facebook—they took that ability away from me and a small group of users some time ago (and, like Twitter, they are dead wrong about what those preferences are)—I see they now lie about what ads I’ve seen and clicked on.
   I can categorically say I have not seen an ad, much less clicked on an ad, for the US Embassy.
   It’s pretty hard for a person who doesn’t use Facebook except for work to have clicked on any ads on their platform.
   And as I’ve largely quit Instagram it’s highly unlikely I accidentally swiped and clicked on an ad there, too.
   On the remote chance that I did, then it shows that either Facebook’s or the US Embassy’s targeting is appallingly bad since I’m not American. I doubt that the US Embassy would have had such a wide market as to include me.
   I theorize, and I do so with zero proof, that Facebook is so deep in its con to claim certain advertising reach numbers that it’s falsely attributing hits to random users across the site. These may have been hits done by bots—bots that it endorses, incidentally—and now they want to pin them on legitimate people.
   It’s a hypothesis but given that I’ve been right about a few way-out ones (false user numbers, bot epidemics, malware downloads), I’m going to advance it. Now let’s wait four years for this to blow up into something.

Above: The only way I can view my advertising preferences on Facebook is through the mobile version. But here they cannot be edited. (The web version won’t show them at all.) They are also quite wrong that these are my interests, but since when have they been right anyway?