Facebook’s ads are annoying users

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In the US, 52% of Facebook users reported seeing more ads on the social network, while nearly half of YouTube and Instagram users said the same of their respective platforms. Across the social platforms we studied, less than 10% of users felt ad load had decreased.

Beyond the chart: Facebook users were also most likely to report seeing annoying ads. This dovetails with what North Carolina State University researchers reported earlier this year: Facebook’s system of inferring user interests—which informs ad targeting—yielded incorrect results around 29% of the time.

The latest chapter in Meta’s advertising woes is a class-action lawsuit filed last week claiming the company tracks user activity in ways that violate Apple’s privacy policies. The social giant is under pressure, by annoyed consumers and concerned brands alike, to improve the ad experience.

More like this:

• Report: Digital Trust Benchmark 2022
• Article: Remember Facebook’s ‘Like’ button plugin? Now it’s doing the same for Reels.
• Article: The biggest social commerce influences on each generation

Read yesterday’s Chart of the Day here.

Methodology: Insider Intelligence surveyed 2,225 social media users in the US between May 20 and June 9, 2022, to gauge how perceptions of digital trustworthiness differ between nine of the largest social platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube. The respondents were selected to align with the US population on the criteria of age (among ages 18–76), gender, household income, and race. The survey was fielded by a third-party sample provider. Data has a margin of error of ±2.1 percentage points at the 95% confidence interval.