{"id":845,"date":"2021-11-20T02:18:02","date_gmt":"2021-11-20T01:18:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/2021\/11\/20\/i-made-the-worlds-blandest-facebook-profile-just-to-see-what-happens-the-atlantic\/"},"modified":"2021-11-20T02:18:02","modified_gmt":"2021-11-20T01:18:02","slug":"i-made-the-worlds-blandest-facebook-profile-just-to-see-what-happens-the-atlantic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/2021\/11\/20\/i-made-the-worlds-blandest-facebook-profile-just-to-see-what-happens-the-atlantic\/","title":{"rendered":"I Made the World&#039;s Blandest Facebook Profile, Just to See What Happens &#8211; The Atlantic"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"cfbc967f0983488262956e73eca9483a\" data-index=\"1\" style=\"float: none; margin:10px 0 10px 0; text-align:center;\">\n<script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-3859091246952232\" crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- blok -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\" data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-3859091246952232\" data-ad-slot=\"1334354390\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\r\n\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/subscriber-newsletters\/\" class=\"BreakingNewsBarDisplay_link__2Hk9v\" data-action=\"click link - breaking bar\" data-label=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/subscriber-newsletters\/\">Only through November 30: Try subscriber newsletters for free<\/a><br \/>My new Facebook account had the most generic interests possible, and still it brought me to a place no one should ever have to go.<br \/>In 2019, a researcher at Facebook conducted an experiment to see whether the platform really has a tendency to send users down a rabbit hole of extreme and conspiratorial content. The employee set up a pair of <a href=\"https:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/story-carol-karen-two-experimental-080010755.html\">fake profiles<\/a>\u2014for Trump-supporting \u201cCarol Smith\u201d and Bernie-loving \u201cKaren Jones\u201d\u2014and then led each one down the path of least resistance, liking whichever groups and pages Facebook\u2019s recommendation system served up. Not a huge surprise: It took less than a week for Carol to be pushed toward online communities dedicated to QAnon, and for Karen to be swamped by lewd anti-Trump material.<br \/>The details of this experiment were found among the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2021\/10\/facebook-papers-outrage-machine\/620556\/\">thousands of documents<\/a> shared with reporters last month by the whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen; \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/tech\/tech-news\/facebook-knew-radicalized-users-rcna3581\">Carol\u2019s Journey to QAnon<\/a>,\u201d in particular, has featured heavily in coverage. But the mere existence of the rabbit hole wasn\u2019t shocking in itself. In 2017, the reporter Ryan Broderick published <a href=\"https:\/\/www.buzzfeednews.com\/article\/ryanhatesthis\/i-made-a-facebook-profile-started-liking-right-wing-pages-an\">a bloggy version<\/a> of the same idea at <em>BuzzFeed<\/em> <em>News<\/em>: \u201cI Made a Facebook Profile, Started Liking Right-Wing Pages, and Radicalized My News Feed in Four Days.\u201d When that piece came out, Facebook responded, \u201cThis isn\u2019t an experiment; it\u2019s a stunt.\u201d Now we know that Broderick\u2019s stunt produced, if nothing else, a replicable result.<br \/>Carol\u2019s journey, like Karen\u2019s and Broderick\u2019s, addressed specific, urgent questions about how Facebook might polarize and confuse American voters. Facebook\u2019s fake accounts started out by liking Fox News and Donald Trump, or else Elizabeth Warren and MoveOn; the one created for <em>BuzzFeed <\/em>went with the Republican National Committee and then\u2013White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, as well as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Taken all together, they show how Facebook\u2019s mechanics, left unchecked, can grab ahold of even the slightest political leaning and bend it to grotesque extremes.<br \/>But none of these experiments has that much to say about what might happen to a Facebook user who doesn\u2019t care about politics at all. Let\u2019s say you never gave the platform any hint about your ideology, or how you\u2019ve ever voted, or whether you even have. Let\u2019s say you made yourself as bland and centrist as you possibly could be, and then let the system do its algorithmic work. Would your account get pulled into some other kind of rabbit hole? And if it did, what would be waiting there?<br \/>For two weeks, I\u2019ve been conducting my own Facebook experiment. I decided to make a new account on the platform as an alternative, apolitical version of myself who enjoys only the most widely beloved things in life. Like the fake Ryan Broderick, and the imaginary Carol Smith and Karen Jones, I would not send or accept any friend requests. I uploaded a real picture of myself, and added my real hometown as my location. Then, my editor and I decided on a list of \u201clikes\u201d that might reflect the tastes of a thoroughly nonpartisan, general-interest American: the Rolling Stones, <em>Grey\u2019s Anatomy<\/em>, Domino\u2019s Pizza, Target, Oprah, wine. From there, I engaged only with pages and groups and posts that Facebook curated for me, in all of its data-hoovering and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/business\/help\/164749007013531?id=401668390442328\">look-alike-audience-building<\/a> wisdom.<br \/>When I liked the Target page, a little widget popped up immediately and prompted me to like 10 other pages, which I did. Some of these recommendations were what one might expect: \u201cTarget Careers,\u201d \u201cAmazon Toys and Games.\u201d Some were not, but they didn\u2019t surprise me: \u201cDr Pepper Snapple Group,\u201d \u201cSweet\u2019N Low.\u201d And some were a total mystery: a financial adviser named Max who lives in Nevada, a home-health-care service in Massachusetts run by an Irish couple. When I liked the \u201cWine\u201d page, I was recommended \u201cBeer,\u201d and also a page called \u201cWe Like the United States of America.\u201d When I liked Domino\u2019s Pizza, I was recommended \u201cArby\u2019s Curly Fries,\u201d as well as the page for a specific Domino\u2019s location in Zimbabwe that had <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/DominosPizzaZimbabweLocation\/posts\/2017649235068023?__cft__%5b0%5d=AZVbuvgSvErBBb5mgbUZypurCT8aOf1-2_lBWDLucntTk-g8GPQsDDG41xuRqNN03hYDlj6DO7SSJRQWx4-MKeBHdyPtIuXa09nL52HdJYDUzKyGvh6ZCu6kt3MOb16E2TV9Il7oFKNPIY1J-iZLL6mE&amp;__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R\">apparently burned down<\/a> in September.<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/ideas\/archive\/2021\/10\/facebook-failed-the-world\/620479\/\">Read: How Facebook fails 90 percent of its users<\/a><br \/>I liked all of it! And then I \u201cliked\u201d all of it. I also joined the first 30 groups that Facebook recommended, including three Rolling Stones\u2013related groups, some generic-sounding stuff like \u201cFunny sarcastic quotes\u201d and \u201cAesthetics,\u201d and some other things \u2026 such as \u201cNana Funny Society,\u201d \u201cGermany dating serious site,\u201d and \u201cOld Men With Trucks.\u201d The next day, an updated (and presumably refined) list of suggested pages appeared in my feed, including a meme page called \u201cTwisted Abyss,\u201d a page for a Travelodge Inn &amp; Suites in South Carolina, a page touting the health benefits of dandelions, and a page for a psychic based in Tucson. I liked all of those and waited a few more days. When I came back, my new suggestions included \u201cMemes for inmates,\u201d \u201cSkulls,\u201d and a page called \u201cDarkness of evil\u201d with an About section signed by \u201cthe jokerman.\u201d I liked all of those too.<br \/>After a week, Facebook started suggesting that I send some friend requests. Though I had entered my hometown, in upstate New York, as my location, almost all of the profiles collected into the \u201cPeople You May Know\u201d widget in my feed were from either Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. In the following days\u2014though I did not send a friend request to anybody\u2014the concentration of Wisconsinites and Pennsylvanians in the widget grew even higher. (Both swing states, so perhaps appropriate for my middle-of-the-road journey?) Yet for some reason, many of my suggested friends from Pennsylvania were specifically from New Castle, a small city in a county northwest of Pittsburgh that voted for Trump by a 30-point margin.<br \/>After establishing my presence on the platform, I loosened up a bit. I checked in each day and liked a few of whatever pages were suggested to me, joined a few of whichever groups, and scrolled through the main feed briefly, liking whatever I saw. I would be told to join a niche-sounding dating group, and end up watching a 30-minute video of a British man livestreaming from his kitchen in a group called \u201cForeigner\u2019s Looking For Filipina,\u201d but clearly not with the goal of finding anyone to date; he was just talking about his breakfast and his life, and telling commenters, \u201cPlease, don\u2019t call me \u2018daddy\u2019; I actually have two daughters.\u201d Or I would notice a vague but ubiquitous hashtag, like #BOOMChallenge, attached to a post about trusting in God or manifesting money, and click to see if I could decipher its meaning, which I never could.<br \/>In the comments below memes about how men and women tend to behave (differently), I would find links to expensive <a href=\"https:\/\/beirresistible.com\/course-catalog\/\">self-help courses<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/javaburn.com\/welcome-v?hop=attract20\">terrifying diet powders<\/a>. Startled by an extremely graphic photo of a vagina or a butthole, I would realize I was looking at an optical illusion being played for laughs and engagement. (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/groups\/656078768272969\/?multi_permalinks=1046053659275476\">Click<\/a> at your own risk.) Moments of true novelty were few and far between, and not any more pleasant. (Again, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/groups\/656078768272969\/posts\/1047252152488960\/?__cft__%5b0%5d=AZUjVmk1l13Bi6a_ETST_3KgfBop9M9wh9W_cfqxHclR133RZVvSfN7nPFX3ATijcoC7tqwOo1kG3oTB60BI3Ixxx6VK2nEP_2pwGbUooaZk3--shczlUvsW24LkmDgajQPd37xERbrU8GFrRIK87iUB&amp;__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R\">be warned<\/a>.) I ended up in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/groups\/870691873417820\">one amazing group<\/a> called \u201cGoofy Huskies,\u201d which was full of great content, but alas, the time I spent there seemed to skew my recommendations toward pages that random people had made for their pets.<br \/>A few days later, I came across an image of white text on a black background, reading, \u201cGIRLS HAVE MAGIC POWERS. THEY GET WET WITHOUT WATER. BLEED WITHOUT INJURY. AND MAKE BONELESS THINGS HARD.\u201d The first comment beneath this post started, \u201cI was totally broken when the love of my life left me,\u201d and ended by providing the WhatsApp number for some kind of love sorcerer named Dr. Moses. Reading these words filled me with despair, but also a sense of cosmic surety that I\u2019d reached the end of my journey.<br \/>After just two weeks on the platform, consuming only content that Facebook\u2019s recommendation systems selected for me, I found myself at the bottom of a rabbit hole not of extremism but of utter trash\u2014bad advice, stolen memes, shady businesses, and sophomoric jokes repeated over and over. Facebook isn\u2019t just dangerous, I learned. It doesn\u2019t merely have the ability to shape offline reality for its billions of users. No, Facebook is also\u2014and perhaps for most people\u2014senseless and demoralizing.<br \/>The results of my experiment fascinated me mostly on account of their brutality. Each post felt like a blunt-force expression of loneliness, desperation, horniness, or all three. At the same time, they seemed entirely inhuman. Who exactly had created these images, with their colorful backgrounds and their text about wanting to be kissed on the forehead or \u201cbent over on the balcony\u201d? It could have been a regular person, or it could have been a violent criminal, or it could have been some demon deep within the machine. My feed was full of promises and emotional declarations: \u201cYou will have money TOMORROW,\u201d or \u201cMay god heal everything That you\u2019re suffering alone,\u201d or \u201cReal men make your panties wet not your eyes.\u201d But they came from nowhere and went nowhere\u2014and they only made me feel worse and worse.<br \/>Even photos of nature and videos of animals were stripped of their basic earthliness<em>. <\/em>A <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/groups\/236895838077118\/posts\/304084004691634\/\">hen<\/a> guarding a litter of kittens seemed real and not real, as the person posting didn\u2019t claim to have filmed it, and I had no idea how the situation had been arranged\u2014or where or why. Same for a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/groups\/1411051669135944\/posts\/2969899899917772\/\">video<\/a> of a girl and a cat eating from the same piece of watermelon\u2014though that one I could trace back to the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/curlysnow0915\/?hl=en\">Instagram account<\/a> it had been stolen from, which belongs to a cat whose profile refers to it as a \u201cpublic figure.\u201d (How can we live like this \u2026 with cats who are public figures?) I became suspicious of anything that verged on being entertaining or useful\u2014a \u201cTikTok hair hack\u201d or a method for making deep-fried ham sandwiches made with Doritos instead of bread\u2014because I could tell that it had been taken from somewhere else and assumed it had been posted only to boost views of something upsetting, like another $47 course on how to \u201cBe Irresistible.\u201d<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/ideas\/archive\/2021\/10\/facebook-metaverse-mark-zuckerberg\/620538\/\">Read: The real reason Facebook changed its name<\/a><br \/>Of course, I wasn\u2019t using Facebook as it was intended\u2014I was using it as a person who had no friends at all. When your family and friends are active on Facebook, you might at least get to see some photos of faces you recognize, doing things you can understand. But I\u2019m not the first person to notice that Facebook has started to resemble something undead. \u201cEarlier this month, the highest-performing link on U.S. Facebook was a five-year-old story about a shelter dog likely posted to the platform by a bot,\u201d Ryan Broderick <a href=\"https:\/\/www.garbageday.email\/p\/pawsome-animal-stories\">wrote<\/a> in October. \u201cThat is 2010-Myspace levels of grim.\u201d In <a href=\"https:\/\/www.platformer.news\/p\/how-plagiarism-explains-facebooks\">recent issues<\/a> of his newsletter, Platformer, Casey Newton picked through a couple of Facebook\u2019s new \u201cWidely Viewed Content\u201d reports, noting how many of the site\u2019s most popular posts had been <a href=\"https:\/\/www.platformer.news\/p\/all-the-most-popular-posts-on-facebook\">ripped off from other sites<\/a> and repurposed, and how many of its biggest pages were both selling something weird and operating like spam networks. If we can say that Facebook is a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2020\/12\/facebook-doomsday-machine\/617384\/\">doomsday machine<\/a>, we can also call it a chicken with its head cut off.<br \/>There were traces of chaos in \u201cCarol\u2019s Journey\u201d too. They weren\u2019t the flashiest part of the experiment, nor did they get mentioned in any Facebook Papers coverage that I read. (I saw them only during a second read of the report.) The fake Carol was an imaginary 41-year-old woman from North Carolina who was a Christian, a fan of Trump, and a mom. The leaked documents start by listing the very first set of recommendations she gets from Facebook in response to these stated characteristics. One is a Donald Trump fan group and one is a Melania Trump fan group\u2014okay. One is a large group for home chefs to share photos of their cooking\u2014sure. Then, for no discernible reason, there\u2019s also a brain-injury support group, a small meme group called \u201cPositively Insane,\u201d a fan group devoted to the San Francisco\u2013based sports announcers Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper, and <em>seven<\/em> groups dedicated to various regions of California (\u201cTri-Valley Friends &amp; Memories,\u201d \u201cYou know you\u2019re from San Leandro if&#8230;\u201d etc.). These recommendations make no sense whatsoever, and yet they apparently weren\u2019t even worth a side note from the report\u2019s author.<br \/>After experiencing it for myself, it seems absurd that this fundamental strangeness of Facebook isn\u2019t a regular topic of conversation. The company would not comment for this story, but elsewhere <a href=\"https:\/\/about.fb.com\/news\/2021\/11\/facebook-widely-viewed-content-report-q3-2021\/\">has acknowledged<\/a> a need to reduce the impact of what it calls \u201clow quality content,\u201d and says that it is now building out its \u201cengagement bait identifiers.\u201d Still, the content that I consumed was so bad, it came off as almost cruel. After Newton\u2019s post directed me to Facebook\u2019s \u201cWidely Viewed Content\u201d reports, I noticed that one of the pages that appeared most often on the list was doing so by sharing silly questions paired with simple graphics, which then received millions of comments. There were setups like \u201c800 seats in heaven, your last three digit of your phone number determines your seat\u201d (7.8 million comments), and \u201cHonor a pet who is no longer with you, who you miss dearly. What was their name?\u201d (8.1 million comments). These sound a lot like questions you might ask if you were trying to hack into a stranger\u2019s bank account.<br \/>Or maybe that\u2019s just how Facebook makes me feel now: preyed upon. My experiment brought me to the understanding that there\u2019s always some trick, angle, or motivation that I can\u2019t quite see. If you don\u2019t take any of your politics to Facebook, you may not get sucked into political extremism. But there are other ways to spiral down to the lowest common denominator, and then lower and lower, and there\u2019s no relief, and there\u2019s no bottom.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2021\/11\/facebook-experiment-toxic-centrist-content\/620731\/\">source<\/a><\/p>\n<!--CusAds0-->\n<div style=\"font-size: 0px; height: 0px; line-height: 0px; margin: 0; padding: 0; clear: both;\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Only through November 30: Try subscriber newsletters for freeMy new Facebook account had the most generic interests possible, and still it brought me to a place no one should ever have to go.In 2019, a researcher at Facebook conducted an experiment to see whether the platform really has a tendency to send users down a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"googlesitekit_rrm_CAow1sXXCw:productID":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-non-classe"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monblogeur.tech\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}