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Ask HN: Is it just me or Facebook is being bombarded by spam?

104 pointsby dondraper36over 2 years ago
I have noticed that my timeline is full of thousands of random posts on celebrities&#x27; account pages.<p>Based on other comments to some of them, I am not the only one. I checked my account&#x27;s activity log and security settings just in case but everything is fine.<p>Do you experience the same?

38 comments

pjc50over 2 years ago
Facebook - and indeed every other content posting system on the internet - is always being bombarded by spam. It seems the spammers have briefly found a gap in the wall and are pouring in.<p>This is your regular reminder that if you want a decentralized anything, you need to solve the spam problem again, which means censoring content.
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gambitingover 2 years ago
Yep. My feed is now an endless scroll of ads and &quot;recommended&quot; channels which are literally also just ads. As an experiment I counted once - had to scroll past 30 of these ads&#x2F;recommended posts before I was finally shown a post from a friend or a group I was actually a part of.
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boffinismover 2 years ago
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;8&#x2F;24&#x2F;23319552&#x2F;facebook-bug-celebrity-spam-memes-carnage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;8&#x2F;24&#x2F;23319552&#x2F;facebook-bug-cel...</a> - media picking up on it
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babyover 2 years ago
Yes same here. If a facebook engineer is reading this, you need to offer a &quot;updates from my friends&quot; timeline, separate from the rest. Make facebook a useful tool again, and add additional functionalities in a non-ambiguous way (so either not to the timeline directly, or in another tab)<p>Oh and, bring back a clear way to make the timeline chronological. This is the first sign that facebook is not designed to be useful, but designed to increase engagement. Let users choose. Power users will tweak their timelines and make it chronological, while others will continue to use the default way.
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nickipover 2 years ago
Events are 10X worse than timeline. Has anyone else noticed this? All the event pages are constantly being bombarded by scammers saying they have &quot;tickets&quot; to the event to sell because they can no longer go for X reason. On some popular events there&#x27;s scam messages every couple minutes. Thousands of fake profiles posting with no details on the profile. Some are even more sophisticated and have rather full profile details. Most of the time they sell &quot;online&quot; tickets, but where I am from almost all the tickets are paper so its easy to spot the scammers.
idk1over 2 years ago
Yes, mine is almost 50% these types of scam ads - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;NH9Nd5j.jpeg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;NH9Nd5j.jpeg</a><p>As everyone here can work out, Amazon&#x27;s latest AI platform did not appear on the BBC news and it was not making banks scared. What&#x27;s very strange is the url in the ad leads to a clothing website when typed in, and a MML pdf when clicked.<p>Anyway to answer you question yes, mind is filled to the brim with these ads and only these ads.
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dustedover 2 years ago
Everything is.. Internet is weird.. The past months, I&#x27;ve had people subscribe to my youtube channel and comment on my videos.. I don&#x27;t upload very interesting things, and only rarely.. I created the channel in 2006, so it&#x27;s definitely weird that now in 2022, people would start to notice.. much more likely to be spam and bots.
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joe_courtedover 2 years ago
Relevant article from Ben Thompson: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;instagram-tiktok-and-the-three-trends&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;instagram-tiktok-and-the-three-...</a><p>This may very well Facebook experimenting with moving into 3 and 4 of Lessin&#x27;s 5 steps in the article. Moving away from content based around friendships, and more towards professional and algorithmic content.
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jimsmartover 2 years ago
The BBC have just reported on it...<p>&quot;Facebook feeds flooded with celebrity spam&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-62659681" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;technology-62659681</a>
hellweaver666over 2 years ago
It&#x27;s in their &quot;reels&quot; as well... every fifth video is a rip off of an existing popular reel either promoting free Robux or 18+ content. The whole platform is just riddled with spam at the moment.
lou1306over 2 years ago
Yes! I noticed the same thing this very morning. Absolutely appalling that they managed to botch the timeline so bad. How could anyone in their right mind believe that I may ever want to see things that random strangers post on those pages?
Lucasoatoover 2 years ago
That&#x27;s absurd, I&#x27;m in Facebook and Instagram mostly to check what&#x27;s happening to my friends, not some random dude thousands km away.<p>Do they really think that changing the algorithm in this way is going to help them in the long term?
sudden_dystopiaover 2 years ago
I don’t know as I don’t have a Facebook any more. But coincidentally, I tried signing up again the other day because I wanted to use the marketplace because Craigslist sucks these days. But I didn’t want to use my actual name because then I would have friends finding me and I would be subjected to all the nonsense and drama that caused me to leave in the first place. So I used a close derivative of my name and they suspended me. Long story short, seems like they have pretty good spam filters.
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napoluxover 2 years ago
And you didn&#x27;t check instagram. if you use hashtags you&#x27;re spammed by bot comments
gwbas1cover 2 years ago
When I used Facebook, I would unsubscribe from celebrities when I would get that kind of thing.<p>I find that Facebook tinkers with the algorithm far too much, IMO, based on whoever complains the loudest. It would probably behoove them to introduce more explicit controls instead of basing the whole thing on machine learning.
zinekellerover 2 years ago
Not just you: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;search?q=facebook+until%3A2022-08-25+since%3A2022-08-24" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;search?q=facebook+until%3A2022-08-25+sin...</a>
GuB-42over 2 years ago
My feed is also terrible, even posts from good friends are terrible (as in: Facebook show me their worst). Lots of spam, chains, etc...<p>I interact very little with Facebook, and while I have friends, I am not part of any group. It is essentially a &quot;read only&quot; thing, so I suspect Facebook algorithms couldn&#x27;t profile me, and as a result they show me the most generic things.
rswskgover 2 years ago
I&#x27;m going posts from groups I&#x27;m not in and have no interest in. None from the actual groups I&#x27;m in. Beyond pointless and useless.
bobkazamakisover 2 years ago
Have to imagine they&#x27;re trying to less aggressively order posts by engagement, and as a result this is what bubbles to the top.
thorinover 2 years ago
Yes, as usual hn answers my own question in quick time! Will be interesting to see how long it takes them to sort this one.
04robover 2 years ago
Facebook&#x2F;Meta has said it&#x27;s a bug: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;8&#x2F;24&#x2F;23319552&#x2F;facebook-bug-celebrity-spam-memes-carnage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;8&#x2F;24&#x2F;23319552&#x2F;facebook-bug-cel...</a>
totetsuover 2 years ago
related? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32245146" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32245146</a><p>The discussion about the Sunset of the Social Network, where you&#x27;ll see less of your friends posts.
diogenescynicover 2 years ago
Go to any Facebook business page and so many reviews are clearly from fake profiles—-people who have no friends, no activity, and only have a picture of a dog or sunset for their profile picture. Facebook is really going downhill.
reitanqildover 2 years ago
Not only outright spam it seems.<p>A Norwegian in another forum wrote that he&#x2F;she (I can&#x27;t remember) had the timeline full of things like birthday greetings from people they didn&#x27;t know to other people they also didn&#x27;t know.
antifaover 2 years ago
Facebook also sends me endless notifications about random shit. They&#x27;ll say &quot;there have been 10+ new posts since the last time-&quot; but the name of the group is cut off and pressing it goes nowhere.
bootloopover 2 years ago
I think the algorithm is broken and it just shows all posts of liked sites.
jeffwaskover 2 years ago
They changed their core purpose and the algo that supports it from being a tool to stay in touch with friends and family to a delivery system for ads and paid content.
BillyJoeLouBobover 2 years ago
People on HN use Facebook?! I was genuinely surprised by the number of responses here. I honestly thought that nobody uses Facebook anymore much less HN users.
dandanuaover 2 years ago
I keep blocking up to 10 pages of movies theme every day that Facebook keeps suggesting to me. For months already.<p>I view it as extremely offensive and abusive behavior, since I don&#x27;t follow any of such pages, even on others sites that can in theory track my behavior and share with Facebook.<p>I guess we are joining the era of corporate techno-fascism, where mega corps don&#x27;t care about actual wishes of people and just push ideas, narratives, sympathies, and other emotions which are suitable to them. F*ck those narcissistic billionaires that build &quot;virtual realities&quot; essentially to exploit the others.<p>BTW, hyper-capitalism and democracy are obviously incompatible with each other. No wonder there so many different crises in the world right now.
dvfjsdhgfvover 2 years ago
They&#x27;re not being bombarded by spam, just increasing revenue without even pretending anyone is checking these &#x27;ads&#x27;.
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peachtree2over 2 years ago
Same thing here, had to unfollow most celebrity pages to get away from the spam
TedShillerover 2 years ago
Has been like this since Facebook was created. This is not new
adelarsqover 2 years ago
I am away from Facebook for some years. But yes, there are a lot of spam on it, even years ago. This was the main reason that I stop using, since a lot of content was irrelevant
LordAtlasover 2 years ago
Oh thank goodness, I&#x27;m not the only one.
vegai_over 2 years ago
Yeah, it is as if they opened some sort of a sewer floodgate. My feed is a diarrhea of alt-right and communist propaganda right now, and everything in between.<p>It was pretty bad before but now it&#x27;s completely unusable.
spegover 2 years ago
It was a bug, and is now fixed.
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philliphaydonover 2 years ago
Facebook is overrun by comment bots spamming propaganda for Russia and China at the moment.<p>Literally any news article that can be related in any way back to Russia or China, or is about America is over run with how great Russia and China is and how Putin is a saviour and how America is going to collapse.<p>Prior to Russian invasion into Ukraine it wasn’t so bad. But 2022 it’s got really bad.
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peachtree2over 2 years ago
Same thing here