I’d begin to wonder about what my contacts and other household members are up to…
Were you at any point in a prolonged thread discussion with Broomstick or Johnny L.A.? 
Maybe the second, but def not the 1st. But it really doesn’t matter, as I’m pretty capable at being blind to popups.
Well, ok but my point is they drill into demographics. I’m sorry to tell you but your internet history shares some aspects of gun buyers’. 
Bizarrely, I’m seeing ads for toy guns right now.
Also sunglasses. I was looking for information about prescription lenses the other day, so I guess that one makes some sense.
I am seeing a ton of right wing ads on the site including gun ads and I assure you it isn’t based on any of my browser history.
Maybe it’s all the discussion about Trump.
It’s based on your browser history, IP, and anything else that those sneaky ad companies can figure out about you.
It doesn’t have to be something direct, i.e. you didn’t have to search for guns. It could be something less directly related, such as the fact that you browse the Straight Dope and we have gun threads here. It could also be that your physical location (based off of your IP) is an area that tends to lean to the right.
Ad brokers don’t publish their algorithms, so we may never know exactly what it was.
Yeah - I understand that. But given everything I hear about big-data being able to correctly asses all manner of things about people, it is amusing to see them being so off-base as to think gun ads would have any chance of doing anything other than piss me off (unless that is their goal, and they are cleverer that I could imagine, playing n-dimensional chess!)
AI doesn’t think better or worse than humans do; it thinks differently. Sure, it makes mistakes: So do we. But it makes different mistakes than we do. And just as we might think “How idiotic do you have to be to make that mistake?”, the AIs might well ask the same question of some of our mistakes.
There’s a big long running topic in MPSIMS that’s basically a gun ad. Why would we expect the powers that be to block gun ads?
What I’ve been getting are ads featuring half-naked starlets of my youth. No complaints except a fear that one of TPTB happens upon a scantily clad Hurst Shifter Girl or Dawn Wells as you’ve never seen her.
But that shrinks to insignificance with the newest ads where the greatest risk of all is Mrs Power sees an ad for a 1:48 scale Brewster Buffalo and recalls, with ill humor, just how much space a model airplane with a 4" wingspan can use up. That, of course, is the wrong time to ask what became of her father’s 1/4 scale PZL P.11, which I understand is now in some Polish museum, but could have landed in the garbage the night of his funeral.
No model airplanes!
I said that wrong – MORE – model airplanes!
TIL:
if you go to
https://adssettings.google.com/
it will tell you what criteria it is using to choose the ads that it shows you.
May help the OP out a bit.
I am not in the market for modular acrylic display cases, Sam’s Club offerings or even “the sunglasses everyone is talking about”, but those are the ads I see in this thread.
I just noted ads for Hawaiian shirts. Wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t recently read that they were adopted by some of the extreme right groups. I really dislike it when groups appropriate something that was previously enjoyable or innocuous.
I don’t see ads.
Why is that?
I was going to suggest that the algorithm thinks you’re a Republican, but I see you posted this before the 6th…
Well, I don’t want the ads for illegal drugs, so I guess that just leaves pet supplies…
In my opinion, this is invasion of privacy and should be banned.
Me either (neither ?) but I do use an adblocker… even if I finally paid to be a member back when we could.
No way was I going to whitelist SMDB uh… SDMB… since I had heard how bad the ads were over the years.
I use an adblocker. To go along with my antivirus program. And my cookie cleaner.
Maybe you’ve accessed some websites that related to guns. So, if you do not want to gun ads that appeared on your social networks, try to stop seeing gun ads. Don’t care about them and one day they won’t show up.