I had a facebook account from 2006 until 2025. I deleted it last week. I think I only signed up because my then-girlfriend wanted to keep tabs on me at university. This facebook account was old enough to drink (in Canada).
From the very get-go, I figured the advertising machine wouldn't bother me if it had bad intel on me. I subscribed to all sorts of weird pages to throw them off the trail. When I checked what facebook's dossier had on me, ("view my data" or whatever), it's main thoughts were that I loved shrimp, "fear and loathing in las vegas", and nihilism. This was delightfully stupid, and the mistargeted ads didn't bother me at all. I generally enjoyed using the platform for years.
Over time, and especially in the last 4 months, the ads got way more concerning. The first couple times I ran into blatant drug ads, I thought it was pretty funny - in a very dark kind of way, but still funny. Eventually I was getting bombarded with ads for cocaine, MDMA, and ketamine. An important note here - whether or not these were scams doesn't matter. Facebook accepted money to show me that ad content - over and over again. "Alright", I thought, "these things happen. Just report the ads and they'll surely come down.". And so, I reported about seven ads. Hilariously enough, the algorithm thought I was really engaging in the cocaine ads (not exactly wrong), and that's all I saw for a bit.
About a week later, I got an update on my reports - no issue with the ads at all. Every report was denied. Kind of weird, but I figured this was an automated response. Surely, escalating it to a human would come to a pretty clear decision to take down advertisements for hard drugs. ...Really? All the bright minds and AI at Meta can't, like, regex for hard drugs in their ad platform? This is intern level stuff. Meta could easily fix this problem, and they actively choose not to.
Anyway, another week passed, and I got an update on the re-reported ads - and wouldn't you know it, Meta just loves advertising cocaine at people. I was reassured that there was no problem at all! In fact, it wouldn't let me follow up on the report. Meta has lots of cocaine ads to sell, you see, and they really dont appreciate me being a narc about it.
All of this drug nonsense happened after an even dumber incident, where some low-effort scammer made an account with my name, and added my friends and family. Luckily nobody fell for their weird scam (that I know of), but it had a familiar plotline: some clown is breaking the law, you can report and re-report all you want, but Meta refuses to fix the issue. I took matters into my own hands and cyber bullied "Troy Denton II" until he stopped signing in. The future is a strange and stupid place.
At the end of the day, if you insist on keeping your house/website/whatever filthy, I'm not gonna fight you on it. I'm just not gonna visit. And so, I deleted all of my Meta accounts. I thought I would miss it, but I really don't. I hope Meta - and Troy Denton II - OD on weird internet drugs.