The evolution of Facebook is the prime example of corporate greed and overzealous advertising infecting a website and successfully normalising its own implementation to the point where almost its entire userbase doesn’t even notice what’s going on in front of their own eyes. Ask a Facebook user where the ads are on the website and they’re likely to point to the sidebar, and maybe even say with a self assured smirk, “Yeah but I don’t see them because I’ve got adblock.”
Here’s the thing. The Facebook feed used to be where I could hear my friends. You know, those people who I wanted to hear more from personally about their lives and general goings on because I’m actually somewhat fond of them. But scroll down your timeline. All you’re going to see is shares of movie trailers and memes and 7 second videos that autoplay with black bars above the top and bottom telling you to watch them. You’ll find your feed interrupted with regular little advertisements that are almost indistinguishable from the myriad of shared content. You’ll find that, whether you realise it or not, you’re contributing to the litter, as “liked” material will get randomly chosen to be slapped on someone else’s feed. Instead of stopping to look at a friend’s photo as you might otherwise have done, you’ll probably scroll past it in the semi-trance state we all enters as we lazily scroll (or swipe) down our feeds, half absorbing the emojis and the brands and the 240p rehosted videos that don’t attribute credit to the original creators.
And then there’s those pages that gain the system. The ones that tell you to vote by leaving a particular reaction on a post, or by either commenting or sharing it, not because they actually give a fuck about what the result will be but because it will allow their page to fly upwards through Facebook’s algorithms so that when they advertise their merch or their site (where they can score on their own ad revenue), more eyes will see it. They’ll adopt pop-culture and repeated low-effort comedy simply in a long-term effort to sell you shit, and that’s 90% of what clutters the website today.
And the most depressing thing is that 99% of users just go along with it. They’ll continue to like, share, comment, tag a mate who conforms to this hilarious stereotype, share an injustice that the media is blowing up to muffle something more important, scroll aimlessly downwards absorbing endless amounts of non-information. A year or more ago I blocked the three most common pages that polluted my feed: The LAD Bible, I Fucking Love Science, and another one that I’ve thankfully forgotten the existence of and cannot recall. But the amount of asinine shit that still makes its way to my screen, telling me what to think and when to laugh and who to hate, is really dragging me down.
And I should quit, right? That’d solve the problem. But I can’t. Because in-between all of the grey-matter is the stuff that I actually want to see. I want to know that my friends are out there and having fun. And I’m not criticising the people who like posts that make them laugh, or share something that’s exciting or hilarious. I’m frustrated with Facebook, and their algorithms, and the way they manipulate each and every user into becoming just another coin in the faceless piggy bank that is their corporation.
Perpetually Perturbed 