I read some article saying that a lot of people get their news from Facebook. I’m like, dafuq you talking about, man? I went there to go check and all I saw were like 5 posts from friends and then reached the bottom of my feed in like 10 seconds. Then I log off because there’s nothing more to see.
Sometimes ao fan will post a meme which I guess counts as news? Not sure what people think news is these days I guess.
I’ve been listening to Careless People on my commute (thanks free Audible from amazon music), which is basically a tell-all from a former Facebook employee.
Tldr; Facebook is a stain on humanity
I find it weird because the only thing political I see is the occasional post by ao fan, she’s really the only one. Other than that it’s entirely kid birthday parties these days.
Well now I know what your algorithm thinks about you
If you were a self conscious teenage girl they’d be flooding you with ads about how if you’d just buy these beauty products you’d solve your problems
I deactivated my FB because its complete junk at this point.
Its just used to sell ads to you. Its honestly turned into a complete cesspit and I am moving away from using US services like that in general (FB used to provide some value add like 10 years ago, but its just awful now).
I am still on Instagram because my wife like using it to share travel pictures with our friends group.
Who’da thunk it?
Oh, yeah, I did, when a friend of mine urged me to join so I could keep in touch with “friends.” This was in, oh, 2005 or so.
Him: “It’s the only way you’ll know when events are happening.”
Me: “Well, I have you, and you know how to reach me, and if the event were that important for you to have me there, you’ll notify me in a less public manner.”
Mind you, this friend has extreme FOMO, and he needed any excuse to get away from his wife and children.
And, most of these “mutual friends” (from college) I had no interest in keeping track of.
Disclaimer: I will occasionally go on my wife’s account to look at an account called “Offside” which chronicles shitty parental behavior toward their kids’ sports arbiters as if it were an American Right in The Constitution.
I think a lot depends on how one defines “news” . . .
Seeing what my friends who has moved away are up to is one kind of news.
Seeing how Trump’s administration is affecting my people is another kind of news.
Both of the above could be obtained through social media . . . and are likely not something found on bbc.com.
I only see ads twice a quarter. Once is right after earnings are announced, the other is at the end of a quarter. Each time, it’s like every 3rd item is an ad. Doesn’t matter how many times I hide every ad, there’s always something else that pops up. Once I get through those 2 days, I don’t see another ad. Mrs. Hoffman has the exact same experience, except she’s never hidden one ad. Either way, the ads we see clearly have nothing to do with us, our alleged interests [spoiler: FB follows you once you leave the site to see where else you go - which is why I go to at least 2 nondescript sites before going to anything I really want to see] or any location remotely near us.
I vaguely recall seeing a news sidebar. It lasted about 10 minutes, because like the rest of FB it was total shit. I don’t get any news from FB, I don’t treat random postings of links by people as news. I’m sure there’s people who live and die by what someone else posts because if it’s on the internet, it must be true.
IMO, there’s no way FB generates the ad revenue it does by putting ads in front of target audiences. Or, in some cases, any audience. [I wouldn’t be surprised if FB had some fine print language saying you agree to pay us and we have no obligation to show your ad anywhere and tried to hide behind it.] I don’t know. I have zero interest in giving FB even a penny to find out.]
As it is, my feed is random posts from days and days past, in no sorted order. If I try to show current posts, I get about 6 or 7 and that’s it. I’m still surprised no one has come up with a better version of FB [is it really that difficult?] that hasn’t wiped FB off the internet, but society is way overdue for that.
You can follow journalists on any social media platform they post on, so this is not an unreasonable source of news, you just need to be aware of the bias and limitations. You could also follow any traditional media account, they all have social media feeds. It is somewhat useful as an aggregator of news sources.
My guess is most people aren’t doing that and just getting served up with their friends and the algo provide them. That’s more problematic - its a pure echo chamber and not at all news.
I used Twitter for a while for “news” as it was a pretty decent way to aggregate breaking news stories. Now I more often go to Bluesky, since Musk has trashed his platform. They both have a “following” tab and a “for you” tab. For you is the algo provided content, which on Twitter is just a dumpster fire of content. I have noticed this feed negatively affects my mood. I absolutely started with an almost exclusive set of left leaning journalists that I follow, but somehow through even slight variations in attention given to clickbait posts that ended up mixed in, its all that feed has become.
Social Dilemma is a must watch for anyone that considers social media a news source. You don’t have to turn away from it, but you should be aware of what it is and what it is not. And in particular, how influential players can manipulate your content.
Not sure what people mean by ads or how Facebook even makes money from them. I’ve never seen them. It’s literally just posts from people I follow.
Some days it’s just one post from ao fan…sometimes my feed is entirely blank because nobody posted.
Sounds more like a cry for help.
I’m not sure. I used Facebook when it drew me from MySpace back in… 2010? But haven’t really used it much in the last 10 years. It’s at best a way to keep in touch with distant friends/family, at worst a perpetual source of FOMO or manufactured rage.
Apparently Trump 1.0 raised loads of money off ads they were buying on Facebook so someone was seeing ads. The only social media I use nowadays is GoA and LinkedIn. The former doesn’t really have ads (unless you count tempting cs threads) and the latter definitely has ads as you scroll.
GoA! Ad free since as long as SL is too lazy to implement them.
I think that those who say they “don’t see ads on Facebook” may nor realize that the ads look like random posts from random people (i.e., Facebook accounts) and they don’t look like your “traditional ad”.
No, not random people. Feed is just from friends with the number dwindling by the day. It’s just a big white space lots of days now.
You can directly ask people here to friend you on Facebook. No need to beat around the bush.
Buckle up kids.
My in laws get pretty much all news from FB. Back in 2022, maybe 2023, they asked me what I thought about Ivermectin. Now I’m not a doctor, but I work adjacent to public health. So I’d heard a lot from our docs, and our epidemiologists, and I’d personally read maybe 8-10 manuscripts. So I spent like 15 minutes laying out what I’d learned, which is that it’s a fantastic drug, but the data says not so much for COVID. And then my FIL says ‘yeah, but I saw on FB a lot of people saying it is a miracle drug for COVID.’ Fantastic.
My brother once sent me a FB link to some news story, also covid related. It was something like CBS news, pretty vanilla article. So, I had to ask, what am I looking for. And he said go read the comments, because those are ‘real people’ not reporters with a slant. He was getting news/info about Covid from FB comments. He graduated from the US AF Academy, but he’s gone full boomer at this point.