I am not providing answers here I am raising a question.
I am going to be honest, there have/are times when I end up scrolling through Facebook. This particularly happens when I am down and finding it difficult to focus. I find the scrolling provides a relief. Part of what I hope with this break from Facebook is that I can find better ways of coping with those times such as making the habit of picking up a book or doing one or so of the zillion jobs I am procrastinating on. At the moment the top two are doing a puzzle on my phone (Mathdoku) and going for a short walk but I hope to widen the options and up my ability to cope with boredom. I still find myself wanting to reach for Facebook. I have it tied down pretty well on both my phone and computers so I have not done so yet.
Following an nasty bout of flu December I ended up more down than I have been for several years and thus the scrolling got worse. It is no good saying just pick up a book, I do not have the concentration to do that in that state and the two minutes of focus just suit my brain in that state. I am not doom scrolling, far more likely to watch Irish Dance, gymnasticss, travel blogs, social interest or renovation blogs than doom laden scenarios. Basically the stuff I would read about in lifestyle magazines in 1980s and 90s. Throw in some spirituality blogs and you basically get what I looked at. It sounds pretty harmless.
Except Facebook would start trying to take me onto new creators who I had not been on before. Sometimes I found someone I enjoyed but some were mildly weird but rarely very weird and I just moved on. Then things began to change. Firstly the videos became shorter. I would no longer get a full episode but only the highlights of a video or the first part and no ability to follow on. I also began to feel that these were being posted by other channels than the original videos.
Then in January this year I got tonnes and tonnes of really weird videos. Videos that used videos with unrelated audio. I did not like this. I felt as if I was being manipulated. The videos’ audio was a male narrated voice that sounded artificial to me. It did not have the cadences of a natural speaker and it was the same voice on every single video regardless of the content. Initially there was some matching of the audio to the actual content of the video but eventually it felt as if they were two separate things.
I responded to this by doing a very tight policy on what I watched and what I liked and cutting my time watching. It pulled things back but I had to be hyper-vigilant or they started coming back into watching.
The only thing I could think of for producing this sort of video was that they were trying to produce an AI version of a successful video. It had gone around the internet looking for what were viral videos, looked for what was the transcript of audio for the videos that went viral and then found what was a popular narrators voice. Then combined the three in what was decidedly spooky.
I could control it on Facebook but it took constant vigilance and with struggling to focus it was only a matter of time before that vigilance lapsed.