I literally just watched Catch Me if You Can last night. Haven't in a while. Have noticed before where I just watched or did something and the next day see a news feed item aligning with that. Is it just a coincidence? Something like this seems just too much to be a coincidence. Some how ad targeting? Though I watched through AppleTV, can't remember if through HBO, Amazon Disney+ or Netflix as I use all the apps all the time interchangeable. Ad targeting would seem most likely but unlike when viewing in a browser where I'd expect to be target seems odd when the interaction wasn't in a browser. Or I suppose it could be that these articles are appearing coincidentally, and just having watching/done something very recently my mind recognizes much more than it would otherwise?
The phenomenon you mention last, is called reticular activation. It's the same thing that occurs when you buy a new car, and suddenly you notice the model you picked has become more popular on the roadways. It's not that sales picked up after you bought it, it's just that your brain now plucks it out of the environment automatically and effortlessly.
What actually happens there usually is whoever you were talking with googles it, they know you were together and might have talked about it through fine grained location data, so now they target ads at you about it as well since the other person’s search immediately after an interaction with you is a good indicator you may have discussed it or you may be interested in it.
Except the fact that Facebook's app may not listen to you doesn't mean advertisers they integrate with don't have sdks in other apps that do / have in the past.
So yes. Phone likely is actually listening to you if you ran into this and actually literally never searched for bell bottom shaped cast iron skillets but see them in your ads now.
Our brains are exceptionally good at pattern matching. The problem is so much of it happens automatically and "subconsciously" that we tend to attribute it to grander schemes.
A good amount of religious motivation has been based on this disconnect in our brains. And plenty of quack science (speaking of conning people).
The flipside is that sometimes things become available and then there's a publicity push on those things. For example, in this case, Catch Me If You Can just became available on one of the popular streaming services, and Abagnale is speaking at an event he wants to promote next week, so the articles appearing about him are likely promotional.
I've noticed something similar as well. I like to think of it as algorithmically assisted bader meinhoff syndrome. It used to be that you heard of something and then saw it because your brain was now aware of it. Now your brain is still aware of what you've just read but digital systems are also looking to feed you things. They're not working together but having two things working at once makes it happen slightly more frequently than if your brain alone was just working to bader meinhoff you. But now your brain sees more patterns and believes it's getting "bader meinhoffed" more often. It's purely a speculative hypothesis and I'm happy to be proven wrong but it's the best answer I've been able to arrive at for a sort of glitch in reality that I've experienced recently as well.
It's unclear if the parent comment is sarcasm or a real comment. Hacker News is certainly not feeding articles to you based on what movies you watched last night.
Netflix also suggested it to me last night. (It had been on my list for a while, but Netflix showed it near the front.) It sounds like he's "trending" and the various services are all feeding on that.
Or another maybe more likely option I guess is that I watched it because it was being featured on one of the app platforms, and then news feed apps/sites know what has been featured and that a lot of people are probably watching a certain show and thus write an article or share an old article that will be top of mind for people. I guess that may be most likely in this particular case.
