Why is Facebook dumping so much unwanted crap in your feed?

After a prolonged break from scrolling my Facebook feed I returned to find it full of dreadful unwanted crap from pages I never followed, and that nobody I follow even recommended to me.

I don’t often scroll through my Facebook feed anymore because platforms like BlueSky and Substack Notes are vastly better at showing me content that I’m actually interested in, from people and pages that I actually follow.

Last week had a cursory scroll through my feed for the first time in almost a year. The deterioration since then is remarkable.

There are still some posts from people and pages I follow, but they’re now interspersed with a load of horrible right-wing extremism; deranged conspiracy theories; AI generated slop; and engagement-bait rubbish from pages I’ve never once shown any interest in.

It’s reminiscent of Twitter’s introduction of the hated "for you" feed full of dreadful divisive content from accounts you don’t follow, expect in Facebook’s case there’s not even the option at the top to switch back to the "following" feed to cut out most of the unwanted crap.

This isn’t the only thing that Facebook seem to be copying from the wreckage of Twitter. They’re also getting rid of content moderation and fact-checkers to let liars, conspiracy theorists, and extreme-right agitators run amok like they have been doing all over the rotting corpse of Twitter.

It doesn’t seem to matter to Mark Zuckerberg or to Facebook’s shareholders that Musk’s changes to Twitter have wiped £billions off the company’s value; driven advertisers away in their droves; and caused a massive upsurge in interest in Twitter alternatives like BlueSky and Mastodon.

These changes clearly aren’t being driven by the profit-seeking motive, otherwise they wouldn’t be copying the tactics of the most dysfunctional wreck of a social media platform, would they?

Another major change on Facebook has been the massive reduction in the power of the share. Back in Facebook’s heyday using the share button meant that a significant proportion of the people who follow you would see what you shared, these days it’s vastly more ineffective.

Instead of seeing what our friends shared, now the algorithm automatically pollutes our feeds with content that nobody tried to share with us. And what a nauseating concoction it is.

I spent about fifteen minutes scrolling through my feed and identifying all the content from pages I don’t follow, and which nobody I follow had used the share button to highlight.

The single biggest component amongst these unwanted posts Facebook is trying to feed me is extreme-right politics, mainly from the UK and US. It’s almost as if Facebook is trying to "correct" my taste for left-wing and socially liberal content by feeding me a poisonous cocktail of right-wing political extremism and bigotry.

The next biggest component is conspiracy theory rubbish. The Facebook algorithm fed me viral posts on chemtrails, Covid-conspiracies, sovereign citizenship, and one particularly egregious post spreading an extraordinarily stupid conspiracy about the Washington aeroplane crash.

If I wanted to know more about the Washington aeroplane crash I’d learn about it from reliable sources (Pilot Debrief on YouTube for example). It’s unfathomable why Facebook thinks I’d be interested in the conspiracy theories of somebody so dumb they think pilots don’t need competent air traffic control instructions and tech like automated proximity warnings, because they should just "look out of the window".

Then there was the all the blatant engagement-bait of pictures of old sweets and suchlike ("we remember this thing, do you?") and memes about how people weren’t all on their phones in the olden days (I genuinely pity the people who use their phones to like memes about how people in the good old days didn’t waste their time on phones).

Apparently the Facebook algorithm has found out that I don’t eat meat, because my feed is suddenly full of posts about how great eating meat is, and it also wants me to be interested in AI generated slop; Elon Musk sycophancy; witchcraft; and radical-right libertarianism.

Of all of the unwanted posts that the Facebook algorithm has been spewing into my feed, the only stuff I was sympathetic towards were a couple of posts about Canadians boycotting US goods in protest at the Trump tariffs.

I’m sure I’m far from alone in thinking these changes have made Facebook dramatically worse, but then you’d have to be quite naive to think that the primary purpose of Facebook was ever to provide good user experience.

Facebook has always been a data-harvesting and advertising platform. The users provide Facebook with all kinds of data about their likes, habits, social connections, locations, and preferences, then Facebook sells this data on to whoever wants to pay for it (including sinister election rigging operations like Cambridge Analytica).

Facebook was good for a while because it allowed likeminded people to connect with one another, and provided a powerful communication platform to the kinds of people who are systematically locked out of establishment politics and conventional media for their non-conformist views, but that was clearly more by accident than by design.

Jeremy Corbyn coming from absolutely nowhere to almost win the 2017 general election on a massive wave of social media support was a shock to the system, and it’s understandable that the Tories and their backers were furious with Facebook.

They’d just spend literally £millions on targeted Facebook ads, but all of the most shared content during the election was left-wing and pro-Corbyn, with the most viral content of all coming from small independent left-wing pages like Another Angry Voice, that didn’t spend a penny on Facebook ads.

Over the following years Facebook have changed the algorithm to drastically reduce the viral power of the share button, and to prevent the vast majority of people who follow pages like AAV from ever seeing any of its content in their feeds.

The changes to inject extreme-right politics and unwanted slop into our feeds are the logical next step.

Instead of merely tinkering with the algorithm to reduce the visibility of left-leaning pages, why not just drown them out by artificially flooding people’s feeds with extreme-right politics; conspiracy theories; and engagement-bait crap too?

It’s plain that Facebook never trusted people to curate their own feeds based on their own tastes, but by directly intervening to feed us content that we neither asked for nor had recommended to us, Facebook is now completely giving up the pretence that it’s some kind of neutral communication platform.

They’re no longer quietly manipulating the algorithm to dictate what we can and cannot see from the pages we actually follow, they’re deciding the kind of content that they want us to see, and pumping this crap directly into our feeds.

I’ve painted myself into a corner somewhat by building up such a large following on Facebook, and leaving it so late to diversify onto better platforms, so I’m going to have to keep posting content there. However, I’m now deeply disinclined to use my Facebook feed to keep up with the news and look for interesting subjects to write about.

For that purpose I’ll be using Substack Notes and BlueSky so that I don’t have to wade through reams of unwanted right-wing extremism; crackpot conspiracy theories; AI generated slop; and engagement-bait dross, all of which I never asked to see, and nobody I follow even recommended to me.

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