Worse was when they ran noisy auto-play video adverts last month. Every time I viewed an image, I was faced with "HEYY WAZAAAPP!!! JUSTIN BEIBER!!!" nonsense.
I'm in Europe, the USA didn't get them, so there wasn't so much of a fuss. They managed to get away with it. Appalling and cynical.
That probably wasn't deliberate on their part. My own experience with running ads is that the networks sell slots to each other in some sort of human centipede-esque manner. And some of the lower levels of this selling centipede get shady and will run abusive ads. You just have to watch out for them and block them / report them to your own network when you can.
I'm in Europe, the USA didn't get them, so there wasn't so much of a fuss. They managed to get away with it. Appalling and cynical.