What's more concerning is that this is not Facebook that is cooked, it's the users who are cooked. Facebooks Algo will only do and continue what brings the most engagement. More and more we are seeing people, mostly younger it seems, be fine with Ai content filling their feeds. It's becoming normalized now so that it can continue to be monetized.
Interestingly these companies once promoted 'body positivity' and now they're pushing down literally unrealistic standards of beauty, but that's another topic of inducing mental illness.
One could argue fox news was the original algorithmic content provider. Quite easily. 30+ years of it now. If those folks don't need deprogramming no one does.
That is a pretty clever algorithm hack. I wonder if you get bombarded with pharmaceutical ads as a consequence.
I also put "non-binary" somewhere on Instagram, and almost every single ad is clothing related, mostly alternative fashion. I'm guessing that's partially aimed at my interests but I almost never buy clothes online, especially not from Instagram. Occasionally I see advertisements for surveys about LGBT people and also sometimes very rarely support sites on how to find queer-friendly therapists, and I bet I could find…
I also wanted to add a story about my fiancé's Instagram account feed, which degenerated into this sort of stuff out of nowhere one day. He has an account about art, he curated his feed, reels, explore tab so that he can see content by other people in his niche, I've seen it myself, all his reels were correctly related to what the account was about. Then one day, out of nowhere, all that disappeared. It's as if the algorithm completely reset, and reverted this account to a completely blank slate, around 1-2 years back. To this day if you look at his explore tab, it's about 75% thirst traps (and I doubt this is the kind he'd be interested in), alongside some extremely broad reaching content, some soccer memes in foreign languages, some "skits", if you can call them that, and extremely bad generic "memes". I saw it happen in front of me, he did not engage with anything like that, he's also not really the type to click on random thirst traps and he has no trouble spotting the usual AI slop. It happened from one hour to another, in an instant. He's still mad about it.
What's more concerning is that this is not Facebook that is cooked, it's the users who are cooked. Facebooks Algo will only do and continue what brings the most engagement. More and more we are seeing people, mostly younger it seems, be fine with Ai content filling their feeds. It's becoming normalized now so that it can continue to be monetized. Interestingly these companies once promoted 'body positivity' and now t…
If users were the problem, why does it immediately show garbage content to new users or males, with zero evidence they want it, as written by other comments here?
I think it's worse, cigarettes never threatened democracy the solution is real easy, section 230 should not apply if there's an recommendation algorithm involved treat the company as a traditional publisher because they are, they're editorialising by selecting the content vs, say, the old style facebook wall (a raw feed from user's friends), which should qualify for section 230
> cigarettes never threatened democracy Off topic, but I bet a book on tobacco cultivation/history would be fascinating. Tobacco cultivation relied on the slave labor of millions and the global tobacco market influenced Jefferson and other American revolutionaries (who were seeing their wealth threatened). I've also read that Spain treated sharing seeds as punishable by death? The rare contrast that makes Monsanto lo…
Mm, definitely. I think it's probably the cash crop that has historically been the most intertwined with politics, even more so than sugar.
Central America, the Balkans, the Levant. The Iroquois and Algonquians. Cuba. The Medicis and the Stuarts. And, as you say, revolutionary Virginia and Maryland. Lots of potential there for a grand narrative covering 600 years or more!
(And, to gp: yes, it absolutely did threaten governments, empires, and entire political systems!)
> So: is this just something wacky with my algorithm? No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago. Some other interesting points: A woman posted on reddit recently saying she noticed her son's feed was filled with this stuff, so she created her own instagram account, identified as a man, and had the same feed.…
> Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. What if you're gay though. They have to be able to detect that somehow too
Probably still a relatively small percentage of the total for them to care.
> cigarettes never threatened democracy Off topic, but I bet a book on tobacco cultivation/history would be fascinating. Tobacco cultivation relied on the slave labor of millions and the global tobacco market influenced Jefferson and other American revolutionaries (who were seeing their wealth threatened). I've also read that Spain treated sharing seeds as punishable by death? The rare contrast that makes Monsanto lo…
Mm, definitely. I think it's probably the cash crop that has historically been the most intertwined with politics, even more so than sugar. Central America, the Balkans, the Levant. The Iroquois and Algonquians. Cuba. The Medicis and the Stuarts. And, as you say, revolutionary Virginia and Maryland. Lots of potential there for a grand narrative covering 600 years or more! (And, to gp: yes, it absolutely did threaten…
Distinguishing between the economic and politics seems impossible—hence the term "political economy". Splitting the two was a bad decision.