Meta just announced that they plan on flooding Instagram and Facebook with AI profiles and bots, and also intend on starting to display ads on Threads starting in January 2025. I have been skeptical about Facebook for a long time – the way they have monetized the platform, compromised privacy, and sell user data. Despite this, I have still used their products.
However, over the last year or so, their products have felt unusable for their intended purpose – connecting and sharing media with other human beings that I want to socialize with online. I deleted Twitter, (not calling it “X”, sorry) as soon as our favorite villain took over. I stopped really posting on Instagram due to the algorithm changes that only show you ads or influencers, opting for stories instead since my actual human friends are more likely to be able to see my posts and vise versa. I stopped posting on Facebook, and only use it for the groups and Facebook Marketplace at this point. I joined Threads recently, which is actually enjoyable, but knowing that it will soon be full of ads makes it hard to want to stick around. I recently deleted my Reddit account because of the increasingly ridiculous rules of moderators, but not before redacting every single comment and post I ever made.
Out of curiosity, when writing this blog post, I wanted to know exactly how often you’re even shown posts by your real friends on these apps, because it has certainly felt like a lot less over the last couple years. I went through my Facebook and Instagram apps and looked through the first 100 posts that I was shown. At 8am on a Tuesday (New Years Eve which may skew this data), I was only shown 4 friends posts on Instagram, and 8 actual friends posts on Facebook.
Let’s start with Facebook. I may not be the norm since I have joined probably a few hundred various groups related to sailing, the PCT, woodworking and whatnot, but 86% of every single post I was shown was from a group! I saw 2 posts that a group created for an event (the same event), 3 posts from a page, 1 recommended post by some random page I don’t follow, and only 8 posts by friends, but only 6 unique people.
Now for Instagram. I only saw 4 posts by actual friends. Almost a quarter of the posts were ads, there were 10 “suggested for you” posts, which to me, are just ads “lite”, and then 62 posts were from brands, meme pages, musicians etc – accounts that often are verified or professional accounts. I would be very curious to see how these numbers changed if I unfollowed every account that wasn’t an actual friend in real life.
Anyway, this is a very tiny experiment, but pretty horrifying snapshot of what already is, and what is likely to come. Facebook plans on launching more AI profiles such as Grandpa Brian. Grandpa Brian doesn’t have hands, he doesn’t have children, because he’s not a real human being with a body, he’s AI. But he posts about his 50 year career in textiles and making clothing for his grandchildren. Sorry but this is just so fucking weird and creepy. Why would anyone want this? What purpose does Grandma Brian offer anyone at all?
I genuinely can’t think of any positive outcomes for the actual human beings who use social media websites with the addition of these fake AI people. As if we weren’t already spammed by ads and algorithms that shoot us down rabbit holes that radicalize people, but now we won’t even know if who we’re interacting with is a human or not? Nope. I’m done.
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984
