Facebook is cooked
Source: Hacker News
First Login After Eight Years
I logged on for the first time in about 8 years to see if there was a group for my neighborhood (there wasn’t). Out of curiosity I scrolled down the main feed.
The first post was the latest xkcd (a page I follow). The next ten posts were not from friends or pages I follow. They were basically all thirst‑traps of young women, mostly AI‑generated, with generic captions. Here’s a sampler (mildly NSFW, with the lewder ones omitted):
Click to show mildly sensitive content (revealing clothing)
I don’t follow any of these pages, so this is what Facebook is pushing to me.
AI‑Generated Content in the News Feed
It wasn’t all like that, though. I also saw an AI video of a policeman confiscating a little boy’s bike, only to bring him a brand‑new one:
There were also some sloppy memes and jokes, mostly about relationships. One (not AI) video sketch showed a woman intentionally starting a fight with her boyfriend because she’s on her period:
Meta even suggests “engagement‑bait” questions for the video, such as:
That’s another “yikes” for me. To be fair, the suggested‑questions feature can be useful. For example, a post with photos of a woman in a short dress (possibly AI‑generated) includes prompts like “Why is she wearing pink heels?” and “What is the woman’s personality?”:
More Evidently AI‑Generated Posts
I said these were “mostly” AI‑generated. With how good the models are today, it’s hard to tell, and a few might be real people. Some posts are obviously AI, such as this image of a woman in a football stadium with alien text and mangled logos on the scoreboard:
Checking the comments, most are variations of “Beautiful” and “I love you”:
…maybe those are bots too.
Reflections on the Algorithm
So, is this just something wacky with my algorithm? Possibly. It’s hard to know if anyone else sees the same thing. I doubt most straight women’s feeds look like this, but I hadn’t logged in for nearly a decade. I wonder what the feed looks like for a lonely older user scrolling the lightly‑clothed AI “gooniverse” for hours each day.
I’d seen screenshots of bizarre content (e.g., a Jesus statue made out of broccoli) a year or two ago and thought it only happened to grandmas. I hadn’t realized it was this pervasive.
Perhaps the evolution is less noticeable for daily users, or maybe the feed only gets this bad when there are no posts from actual friends.
Conclusion
I stopped exploring after seeing a couple more AI‑generated pictures of girls who looked about 14, which made me sick to my stomach. So long, Facebook—see you never—until the day I inexplicably need to use the platform to get updates from my kid’s school.