Social media has turned into a social disease

Allow me to begin with a brief metaphor.

Say you have a favorite restaurant you've been going to for years. The cuisine isn't especially haute — closer to Applebee's than Auberge du Soleil — but it has a big laminated menu with pictures of the food on it, and there's always something you can eat. You've gotten to know the waitstaff, and every so often some of your friends and relatives stop by. It's become part of your regular routine.

Then, after a while, things start to change. There's a new menu. The standard dishes are still there, but the new items look a bit dodgy. The clientele has gotten rougher: there are guys with Eastern European accents and neck tattoos in the booth next to you. The servers have gotten more aggressive and start pushing you to order the daily special. Fights start breaking out. Some of your friends stop going there.

One day you take your usual seat and order your usual dish, and the server returns with a bowl full of viscous grey goo. You complain that this isn't what you ordered; the server tells you it's what they're serving, and you can eat it or go home.

Would you still go to this restaurant?

No, you wouldn't. So why are you still on Facebook?

The slop also rises

This is what social media has become. What started as a way to stay connected with distant friends and relatives, keep up with world events, and cyber-stalk your exes has become a flaming dumpster fire that encapsulates everything that's wrong with the Internet. The billionaire owners of these platforms don't give one skinny turd about whether you like what they're serving; all they care about is how they can get you to consume more of it.

Increasingly, the menu is AI slop — shitty, machine-generated images and video designed to capture your eyeballs and never let go, like the now famous image of “Shrimp Jesus” at the top of this post. Some of this slop is pure political propaganda. Some of it is manipulative bullshit. And some of it is so disturbing I don't even want to describe it, let alone show pictures of it.

My old pal Harry McCracken, a longtime editor at Fast Company, recently published a column titled "Facebook's AI slop hellscape is already here." He writes:

Something like half the posts I’ve seen involve AI-generated images of senior citizens—as old as 120—showing off birthday cakes they’ve baked themselves. Most of the others relate to talented craftspeople who have fashioned elaborate sculptures out of materials as diverse as wood, ice, and vegetables. ... [A]ll of it is meant to tug at the heartstrings, often in nakedly manipulative ways. A pretty high percentage of the cake bakers and craftspeople explain that their accomplishment has gone unacknowledged. Sometimes they look downright morose about the lack of love. That’s presumably meant to get Facebook members clicking, which they do—sometimes to the tune of thousands of comments and tens of thousands of likes.

Though Harry says he still finds parts of Facebook "wonderful" (for reasons that elude my understanding), generative AI has turned it into "the junkiest digital junk food imaginable."

Here's the thing. These social networks — not just Meta, but virtually all of the mainstream platforms — aren't simply allowing this crap to pollute people's feeds, they're incentivizing it. 404 Media's Jason Koebler has been following AI slop for the last year. He notes that these images and videos are perfectly tuned to feed the algorithms warping our collective sense of reality — and that's the point. (If you click that link, be aware that there are some truly disturbing images in Jason's story.)

He writes:

Platforms and new types of startup companies aren't trying to stop this spam. They benefit from it, enable it, and worst of all, are finding ways to supercharge it. Brute forcing the algorithms with AI is not just a trick that entrepreneurial teenagers have discovered. The social media giants who themselves make the algorithms that are under attack are not only paying AI spammers to slopify their platforms, they are building tools that will help them spam more profitably. This means that, unlike most security vulnerabilities that are urgently fixed, there is no indication that any help is coming. 

So I ask again, Why are you still on Facebook?

The anti-social network

Regular readers may remember that I vowed to go on a social media fast for the month of February, and for the most part I did that, with only a few exceptions. I started by removing the icons for Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and others from my phone home screen — which, I have to say, reduces the temptation to check in on these things by about 90 percent.

I did not include LInkedIn as part of my social media fast, because I use it on a daily basis for my work. And besides, keeping LinkedIn during a fast is like deciding to go on a hunger strike but still eating matzah. Even then, with the utter collapse of democracy and our collective sense of decency, LinkedIn has also turned into a cesspool of political arguments that is probably better avoided.

More exceptions: I posted one thing to my Insta account, a poem by Philip Larkin that seemed appropriate to our current situation. I am currently trying to locate an old friend I haven't talked to in 45 years, so I logged into my faux Facebook account to try and find him. (He apparently doesn't use social media, as far as I can tell.) I spent a little time on it today before writing this post, looking for AI Slop and thankfully not finding any. I discovered that one of my friends recently broke his wrist (Sorry to hear that, Bennet) and that another recently visited Starbucks for the first time in months (Go Bekah).

Otherwise, nada. And you know what? I didn't miss it. I did manage to find other digital ways to waste my time, mostly mobile games (I'm still a Mahjong Mental Giant, in case you're wondering). I also discovered that relieving myself of the compulsion to record my daily existence and upload it to social media — to reassure distant friends and relations that yes, I do in fact have a life — was quite freeing. I was able to enjoy these things more fully in the moment, without inserting my phone between me and the experience I was having. So that was enlightening.

Personally, I think there are more good reasons to quit social media than there are to stay on it — most of them having to do with who controls these networks, the amount of highly personal data they're gathering, and the evil ways in which this information can be used to manipulate public opinion and surveil dissidents. [1]

Your mileage may vary. You may get more out of these things than I do, or have fewer concerns. But even if you're not willing to go Full Amish, I urge you to think about why you're really on these platforms, and whether the experience is benefiting you as much as it benefits the billionaires who own these things and don't give a rat's ass about you or your experience.

Have you quit any social networks lately? Share your experience in the comments or email me: [email protected].

[1] Multiple observers over the years have compared Facebook's data collection practices to those of the East German secret police. These days, it's really not hard to imagine Zuckerberg as the Commandant of the Stasi.