Facebook allows users to check various interest boxes so consumers can see advertisements more relevant to them…in theory that is. A new study from North Carolina State University sampled users of these tools and found that almost a third of the users were not actually interested in the categories provided to them. These results were similar to previous experiments where ads were found to be inaccurate or irrelevant to selected interests. Many of Facebook’s tools remain a mystery and are very opaque under the hood. The mystery shrouding these algorithms keep advertisers from knowing exactly why their ads aren’t reaching the target audience. However, this problem isn’t specific to Facebook, these findings are relatively similar to a variety of targeted advertising sites.
