@Mouse Organ,
No.
What is happening is you're being served ads which match as closely as possible to your interests.
You may not think you are communicating your interests, but you are, even when you're not on FB. You do so by:
- Who you're friends with
- Who you're just following
- What the people in both of those groups are posting
- Whatever you love makes a high connection to your preferences
- Whatever you hit the angry reaction on also makes a high connection to your preferences, albeit a negative connection
- Whatever you share
- Whatever you post which is original, i.e. not a share
- Whatever you buy from a retailer which advertises on FB, even if not purchased through FB or while you were logged into FB. If you're online and using the same email address and IP address for both FB and your purchase, then FB knows about it
- Anything you comment on
- The groups you join, and how active you are in them
- Whatever you like, or hit the care or sad reacts to, but those hold less weight than love and angry reacts
- The games you play on FB, if any
- The pages you follow
- If you ever use (or have in the past) a temporary frame for your avatar, particularly if it's from a political organization of some sort, or a retailer
- The images you're tagged in, whether you uploaded them, or not
- Whatever you've got in your profile
Now, before anyone screws on a tinfoil hat too tightly, allow me to explain.
Unless you're reported for hate speech or the like, FB doesn't give a damn about what, specifically, you post, etc. There are over a billion daily users and a surprisingly tiny number of employees at FB (about 52,000 - you can just Google
number of Facebook employees and the figure will come right up). They don't get granular unless you're super-famous - as in Paul McCartney famous - or legal action is threatened, or it's something truly dire (e.g. Nazi postings, etc.).
For advertising, it's all aggregations. Not only does that make it manageable for FB and its servers, it also satisfies GDPR.
What FB and its advertisers
are doing is, they are targeting and matching keywords. What sorts of keywords? Whatever the advertisers are trying to get you to be interested in.
Hence, for a 50 year old American white man, they might be targeting a term like
Lynyrd Skynyrd. If he likes a similar page (say, for the Neil Young fandom), then he may be thrown into the "similar audience" bucket. Voila, he'd served with ads to download Lynyrd Skynyrd music. Or he may be served with ads to visit the American south as a tourist or for southern-style foods or restaurants.
For a 16 year old Japanese girl, they might be targeting
anime or
K-Pop or the like. If she types, "Can't wait for the new song from BTS!" then FB might serve her an ad for a virtual concert by a similar K-Pop group, Stray Kids. Or might serve her an ad for the latest fashions the girls in female K-Pop groups are wearing/hawking.
It works like a well-oiled machine, and a lot of that has to do with the structure of FB advertising. See, clicks with nothing else going on are expensive. But clicks where a purchase is made? Those are worth it. Hence, advertisers are compelled to make their audience matching as clear and unambiguous as possible. Advertise enough on FB (the company I work for sure does) and you'll get assigned a rep to guide you through improving your ad targeting. After all, FB makes money when its advertisers do, and it makes even more money if their advertisers stick around and launch campaign after campaign.
Another twist is what's called ad retargeting. It pulls similar cues but those also include a cookie from wherever you've been surfing. Say you went to LL Bean's website and ordered boots but left them in the cart and then went about your business elsewhere. That's an abandoned cart, and LL Bean and other online retailers know that there's money in getting people to return to their abandoned carts.
Hence you might start to see ads for those same boots. Or you may see more of a print ad from LL Bean, telling you, "Now, don't forget about those boots!"
Retailers have learned that if they retarget too much, or it seems a little too on the nose, that that freaks customers out. Hence they are trying to be more subtle these days. But retargeting is still out there, it's huge, and it's perfectly legal.
FYI I am the Content Manager in the Marketing Department for a business credit advisory company, and we advertise on FB a lot. And before that, I worked for a company selling ad retargeting services.