> 2. It posits that everyone who has experienced this is unsophisticated and ignorant about cognitive distortion.
Not really, it just suggests people aren't perfect statisticians and perfect at recording information. Which we aren't.
> People also have experiences of unlikely events but which have well understood or easy-to-estimate probabilities
The probability of seeing a relevant advert is not something we can easily estimate.
> Lots of people can distinguish quite well between their own illusory biases and events which are coincidental,
I would be shocked if this was even a reasonable percentage of people. I am certainly not a perfect innate statistician with perfect recall, and I think most other people are not either. Humans are just bad at this stuff.
> which didn't occur much historically.
I'd be shocked at anyone with a very solid recall of all the adverts they see.
Without strong evidence, this seems like a perfectly reasonable base view. It'd be a complex, expensive, power and data hungry way of targeting adverts, extremely controversial and possibly illegal. There's no evidence they're actually doing it, no whistleblowers, and many of their adverts are just terribly targeted.
People here are bringing up examples like a young couple being advertised a pregnancy test. Hardly requires invasive monitoring of a billion people to achieve.