Facebook’s feed is a disaster and our tech overlords are emperors with no clothes

Earlier this year, my Facebook feed was suddenly awash with homosexual content for a couple of weeks. Now, it’s on to half naked women, all with no rhyme or reason. The veneer of all powerful technology is mostly false marketing spin or delusions of grandeur… 

Today’s world is driven by technology, creating the general impression that leading tech companies are our digital overlords, deploying cutting edge software to collect, analyze, distribute, and monetize our personal data, as well as predict how we will react to new content, features, and advertisers.  It’s said that technology has made us sick, addicted, destroyed our youth, divided us as a country, spread misinformation, and all sorts of other woes. Recently, much has been made of the emergence of Artificial Intelligence, which some believe will result in the extinction of the entire human race in the not too distant future, imagining all sorts of horrible scenarios straight out of a science fiction movie.  Microsoft and Google have both announced various plans to include this supposedly next generation technology in their products, and it is assumed that others like Facebook and Twitter will follow suit, leading inevitably down the path of our own destruction.  This belief is not limited to cranks standing on street corners.  Intelligent people including Twitter’s own Elon Musk have recommended a pause on new development of Artificial Intelligence for fear it might turn on its creator, and the media has broadcast these claims far and wide.  Overall, it’s enough to make one wonder if any of these people – either in the tech industry or the media that reports on it – actually use these products in the first place because precious little of the vaunted technical acumen is on display in our daily lives.  Facebook and Twitter feeds, for example, represent the heart of both company’s businesses.  This is where users discover what their contacts are sharing, what updates they have posted, and where you are exposed to recommended content from related groups or advertisers.  In principle, it should be a finely curated feed based on your profile, your friends and contacts, their friends and contacts, and your previous interactions with the platform and other data sources.  It is through this data, we are told, that Big Tech has the power to precisely target consumers and drive interaction with their advertisers, if not control us outright based on what we see and what the company chooses we don’t see.  There is nothing more important for either company’s revenue than a highly targeted, predictive, and relevant to the user feed.  If the content does not appear there prominently, the great majority of users are likely to miss it entirely.

At least, this is the theory.  The practice is rather underwhelming if we are being completely honest.  I am not a regular Twitter user, but Facebook’s feed seems more like an almost random assortment of unrelated information than anything intentional, much less crafted by some super computer to either sell me something or influence my behavior.  A few of my friends and family members are prominent, but some almost never seem to appear as if they don’t exist.  This appears to hold true regardless of whether or not a particular post is popular.  Instead, the thinking seems to be entirely linear – Christian interacts with these 5-10 people most often, therefore he always sees those 5-10 people, no one else is relevant.  Otherwise, the few groups I participate in (Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Sopranos, Alex Lifeson, a group on greyhounds, and a couple of car racing forums) dominate the non-recommended and non-sponsored section of my feed.   The recommended and sponsored portions are where one would expect to see the sophistication of the underlying software in action, but outside of advertisements for sites I have visited or products I have searched, nothing seems to make any sense at all.  Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than two sudden occurrences this year.  In January and February, Facebook began promoting and recommending content and products for the homosexual community prominently in my feed.  Every dozen or so posts would be interspersed with pictures of half-naked men and products designed to improve homosexual intercourse.  This struck me as exceedingly strange given Facebook knows I am a man married to a woman, nor have I ever interacted with or reposted similar content.  Not being a prude or easily offended in general, I didn’t think anything of it, especially as the posts entirely disappeared within a couple of weeks.  Lately, however, Facebook has taken on the polar opposite character.  Instead of half naked men, my feed is now dominated by half naked women, mainly in bikinis.  While I consider this a more positive development, it makes about as much sense from an advertisers perspective as the sudden shift to homosexual content did earlier in the year.  The images are certainly pleasant enough, but what they have to do with me, why they are there, and what the goal is remains entirely a mystery.  Throughout, there are the requisite ads for Hims erectile dysfunction and premature ejaculation products, though why one would need both at the same time remains equally mysterious.  Interestingly, my brother commented last week that he appears to be in the midst of a wash of homosexual content, suggesting that these odd trends are not unique to me.

This is doubly surprising when you consider that neither of us are particularly complex Facebook users.  A human could look at the summary information of my usage and tell you what my interests are with a high level of accuracy in just a few minutes.  I post 3-5 political and cultural articles per week from this blog.  I interact almost entirely with posts from my friends, the great majority of whom I have an obvious relationship with from high school, college, work, or participation in a group.  The only thing I ever search for is a post from a friend.  I do not watch many videos, browse anything except the feed, and rarely, if ever, comment on recommended posts.  In short, neither my social circle nor my interests are particularly broad, and my usage is almost entirely straightforward.  If Facebook’s algorithm were nearly as intelligent as it’s claimed to be, I am about the easiest person in the world to predict and influence.  Instead, it’s almost completely and totally useless, more random and undirected than anything else to the point where I scan through it so quickly I barely know what I’m looking at, and it’s certainly not driving any actual business for their advertisers.  Some might say this is a good thing considering I am Facebook’s product instead of their customer, but it does raise a few concerns.  First, it is difficult to reconcile the public image of Facebook and other tech companies with what they are actually doing on a day to day basis.  Setting aside the scale of handling billions of visits and gigabytes of content per day, no mean feat, Facebook and presumably Twitter are effectively basic bulletin boards and messaging services, little different than MySpace and the old AIM Instant Messenger plus advertisements.  The veneer of all powerful technology is mostly false marketing spin or delusions of grandeur if Facebook cannot predict the most basic of interactions as part of its core service offering to advertisers.  Second, the mainstream media has fallen for the hype instead of covering the reality.  As I have argued, social media in general is an easy target for the world’s woes, but it is difficult to see how a mildly upgraded version of software we laugh at in retrospect can have that kind of power, save that we allow ourselves to buy into the illusion of a digital Wizard of Oz rather than looking at things for what they truly are.  Third, it’s almost impossible to believe that we’re going to leap from the current state of poorly performing algorithms that exhibit next to no intelligence to something truly intelligent in the near future.  ChatGPT might be amazing in principle, but in practice it is not likely to live up to expectations, much less take over the world.

Lastly, there is a broader question to be had about the unique combination of fraudulence and credulity that has infected the upper echelons of our society.  Facebook doesn’t do what it’s claimed to right now, but somehow we’re supposed to believe the extinction of the human race is imminent – assuming we survive that long under the manipulative, intentionally addictive algorithms of our current social media landscape.  Lest you think I am picking on Facebook and foregoing the other tech companies, I could write much the same thing about Google, who’s news feed might be a little more accurate, but generally displays the same sites over and over again and only rarely surfaces something of new interest.  Google Home, meanwhile, is a network of devices that only works for the most basic tasks.  Any complex question is greeted with a response suggesting the computer didn’t understand it or couldn’t do it.  The software can’t even get the room right most of the time.  I use an Android phone, have a Google TV in the living room, and a Google speaker in the kitchen.  When we say “Hey Google” for whatever reason, invariably every one of them lights up and the task – even a basic timer for cooking – is almost randomly assigned.  This isn’t even to suggest that both Facebook and Google aren’t good companies or I dislike their products; I use both almost every day and believe each company provides a service worth my time and energy, connecting me to my friends and family and allowing me to access information better than I would have imagined as a child.  It just seems to me that the challenges they are trying to solve and the vision they are trying to accomplish is beyond our current capabilities at this point in the evolution of technology.  I do not blame Facebook, Google, and others for claiming they’re products do this and that.  I sold Toyotas and Nissans in the 1990s, and regularly compared them to BMW and Mercedes.  No company is going to tell you its product isn’t advanced or cutting edge.  It is the media’s job, however, to vet these claims and report on the difference between pro-company propaganda and reality.  Instead, they regurgitate claims both for and against, offering almost no skepticism.  One has to wonder two things: Why, and if they do it with technology, what else are we being told with little or no resemblance to the truth?  In other words, if this emperor has no clothes, he or she is not likely alone.