Ask HN: Is your Facebook feed also full of video mimicking pedophilia or hate | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is your Facebook feed also full of video mimicking pedophilia or hate

5 pointsoulipo212 comments

Since a few weeks there is an avalanche of videos in my Facebook feed (I haven't asked for anything of the sort) with "very young girls in evocative swimsuits" (think: Donald Trump's favorite age range), or fake MAGA people interview, or people just throwing a fit in public (AI generated, meant to make the audience enrage)

All of this:

- costs CO2 emissions

- costs real dollars

- is pushing the society toward more and more hate and divergence

why do we accept this shit? Also engineers working in AI, is that really the world you want to build?

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Yeah, I’ve noticed the same trend - Facebook’s recommendation algorithm seems to have gone off the rails lately. It’s aggressively pushing shocking or borderline content to maximize engagement. What’s scary is how subtle it’s become - it’s not explicit, but it plays on outrage or taboo just enough to keep people watching.

Feels like the platform is optimizing purely for watch time, not safety or decency anymore.

Exactly, it's using its audience as cattle and trying to push their buttons, just for more "attention time" and more clicks, to sell more ads...

what a pathetic use of the brains of a generation of engineers working for this

While I don't use Facebook, my YouTube feed is similar.

I don't subscribe to anything in YouTube and nor do I log in. All I watch is a few music videos a week, 80s electronic. The front page that seeks to identify me via fingerprinting and darkpatterning my browser rarely if ever has any music videos let alone the stuff I watch, instead it has exactly as posted by OP with less young women and almost everything hate - fake or real crimes clipped to incense, video jockeys obsessed with race.

The algorithm is actively creating a hateful, fearful populace.

Divide the masses, destroy their earning potential, construct your castles, ingratiate the current lords. This is the path to feudalism.

The point is and always has been to aggravate and arouse, because it's proven that the more emotionally charged the content of any feed, the more engagement it generates, and engagement is sold to advertisers.

And this HN post is at this moment lighting up FB servers with accesses by otherwise quiet accounts looking to confirm your report...

So, excellent work on behalf of FB!

I rarely go on facebook. Checking now.

Guns, Scifi, Religion, Tech, and lots and lots of jokes/memes.

Besides every other post being an AD, nothing objectionable at all.

Lets talk about how the algorithm works. It gives you want you want, what you interact with. On occasion offer things that other people like your profile do like. If you dont like something, you click the 3 dots and say 'not interested' and it goes away.

I'm guessing you dont have a brand new account where it's attempting to guess what you like; you interact with those things or the people like you do interact with those. You probably like to post on MAGA related things to tell them how terrible they are or whatever; but the algorithm doesnt consider if you're taking it positively or negatively.

>why do we accept this shit? Also engineers working in AI, is that really the world you want to build?

Working as intended. You will keep getting what you want. You have to do some soul searching of why this is happening to you.

There is debate to be had, often we cant see the big picture or consequences of new innovations.

Example of this kind of shit content: https://www.facebook.com/reel/726005533801035

and, no, I've never searched for "people getting into fight over a fart in an airplane", or anything like that

no, but perhaps you've watched 'fight videos' or something more generic and that's the keyword(s) that are applying.

No judgement from me, but this is what you want.

Do a cleanup using the 3 dots.

I don't, and judging from the other comments on the post, I'm not the only one to have noticed that Facebook is pushing sexual / pedo / violent AI slop...

I mainly only ever go on Facebook to buy/sell things on marketplace these days. Since it is the default landing page, I do see my feed and notice that it does have very little content from my actual friends. It’s mostly ads and “things I might like.” It got pretty awful for a while but it does seem to do a decent job once you block people and give feedback on posts/ads. It’s still pretty useless, and I avoid it as much as possible, but at least now it’s not hitting me in the face with graphic, hateful memes and misinformation every time I log in

I think I remember having Facebook.

Silicon Valley created anti social behavior as a service and call it innovation.

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