I just wanted to express my irritation with what social media has become. It used to be so innocent – a place to talk to your friends online. A place to make new friends. The days of Myspace are long gone and it’s becoming more sinister every single year.
The AI algorithms took over – and far longer ago than most people realize.
Even back around the 2016 election the ‘marketing’ AI that Facebook and Instagram implemented was segmenting people into different groups and only allowing content to be seen within those groups… and that was all done with zero human oversight.
The AI was deciding you were ‘swayable’ or ignorant and showing you incredibly fake news.
If you were intelligent and unlikely to fall for that fake news, you didn’t even see it.
To really drive that point home – have you ever heard a family member or someone you know make an outlandish ridiculous claim and then say they read it on the internet? Most likely!
Have you ever tried to find that actual claim and come up short – in fact, you many only find references to whatever their claim is as being entirely false, but not find the original claim they saw somewhere on some feed.
That’s exactly what that segmentation did – it created a new reality for every single person in the algorithm.
We used to tell people to ‘google it’ and expect them to find the same data we are looking at. Well, google decided to do the same thing that Meta did.
Now we live in a world where facts to me aren’t going to be the same facts that you find. Google created a consumeristic, capitalistic “search engine” that’s primary goal is to get you to BUY something.
They completely abandoned the idea that they provided resources as a search engine. They are now entirely focused on the marketing aspect after they took over the entire search engine market.
So while I am focused on social media in this post – it’s a big tech problem in general.
Social media is a special sort of evil because it appeals to our core humanity. We want to talk to our friends and family. We want people to like us. We want to feel connected to a community.
They have perverted the concept of ‘social’ and turned it into an isolation tank that’s sole purpose is to make you feel a certain way – so you buy something.
Feel fat? Buy workout gear, buy weight loss pills, buy a gym membership, click on this link for a magic gummy bear that’s going to solve your life problems.
Don’t feel like you have enough friends? Click here and pay bumble for a premium tier to connect with people near you.
Don’t have a partner? Buckle up, because Tinder gold is ~$25–$45/month depending on how desperate they consider your age, gender, and location demographic.
Yes you read that range right. Not only information and the content you see is different depending on who’s phone you look through – but the price you pay is impacted by these AI subdivision marketing algorithms. Men are getting charged more than women, since there are more men on the apps… and older people are paying far more than younger people.
Your demographic also highly affects which people you see on dating apps in general. They aren’t going to show you people you might actually connect with on a real level, because that would mean you would stop paying them! True relationships are not their goal – making the most money possible off your desperation is the point. It’s not a smart business decision for them if you end up in a happy relationship quickly and delete their app.
Bot traffic today is making up more than half the internet traffic – recently released studies show we actually hit that threshold back in 2024. In 2026 we are likely seeing upwards of 60% of the internet, mostly social media, being dominated by robots.
This is another aspect of the pure evil of social media. They don’t block or delete bot accounts, in fact Meta is actively ENCOURAGING robots on their apps.
These robots are all friends with each other, have location tags, have images (AI generated but it’s getting hard to tell) and they claim to work at real businesses. They claim to be single moms and hard working dads. They claim to be veterans.
A shocking amount of these robot networks are coming out of Russia and South Asian countries – and what are they spending all their time doing? Spreading fake news, hate, and derision in comment sections and posting nonsense memes and fake AI images.
If you control a bot network of over a million profiles – you can sway public opinion easily. Start looking at the profiles who are posting hateful things on your local news source’s posts. How many friends do they have? How many images do they have, and are they of real people – or are they AI generated? Was this account made since 2020 – or even in 2018?
A crazy aspect of the bot takeover on social media is that a huge amount of these profiles were created with simplistic API access a decade ago, using very crude manually programmed bots before generative AI we think of today really existed. These programmers and malicious actors knew this AI revolution was coming. They knew they’d be able to control millions of accounts easily some day, and now that day is here.
Don’t let social media convince you to hate your neighbors.
Be careful of who you trust online – do you know this person or public figure in real life?
Social media is evil, but people are not.
Go out to local shows, go volunteer, go to the farmer’s market and have a real conversation with people. A smile is always a great way to start making friends, and people love telling you about their projects.
Good luck out there and keep it real.
-Becca