Instagram Facebook Ads Won't Show You

junh3 May 04, 2021

Companies like Facebook don't create technology for you, they create technology for your data. They collect everything they can on FB, Instagram and WhatsApp in order to sell visibility on people and their lives.

It's not exactly a secret, but the full picture is blurry for the most part - hidden in complex systems of opaque rendering and fine print designed to scroll. The way most Internet activity works today would be considered intolerable if translated into understandable analogues of the real world, but it endures because it is invisible.

However, Facebook's own tools have the potential to disclose what is otherwise invisible. It is already possible to catch fragments of these truths in the advertisements presented to you; they are glimmers that reflect the world of a stranger watching you and knowing you. We wanted to use these same tools to directly highlight how most technologies work. We wanted to buy Instagram ads.

We've created a multi-variant targeted ad designed to show you the personal data Facebook collects about you and sells access to. The ad would simply display some of the collected information about the viewer that the ad platform uses. Facebook was not into this idea.

Facebook is more than willing to sell visibility into people's lives, unless it's to tell people how their data is being used. Being transparent about how ads use people's data is apparently enough to get you banned; in the world of Facebook, the only acceptable use is to hide what you are doing from your audience.

So here are some examples of targeted ads that you will never see on Instagram. Yours would have been then you.