Rage Induced by the Machine

I don't really use Facebook anymore. It's an open tab and an app on my phone, so I check it periodically out of habit, but it's not part of my basic rotation.

I'm a millennial, so I started using Facebook in college, when it was limited to college. I didn't at all mind it expanding to "everyone" -- hey, I was graduating too -- and for quite some time it did exactly what I wanted it to do: served as a convenient vector to keep up with friends who had flung themselves around the country. And that would still be a nice use today -- I'd love to know what people are up to these days. So many cute babies!

But alas, these days Facebook is essentially worthless. No, that's too tame -- it's actively malignant. When I open Facebook, it defaults to an algorithmic feed that maybe shows an actual friend's post once in every half a dozen. The majority of posts are either AI slop history lessons or, more often, polarizing political ragebait. The irony is there isn't a clear side to the ragebait, though for me it's mostly Israel- and antisemitism related. But it's invariably someone angry about something and expressing their position in the most inflammatory way possible. Every time I click through to read more, I feel myself becoming a worse person.

And that's not even the bottom of the pit. God help me if I read comments. Even on the rare occasion I get a basically neutral news article or press release, the comments are just full of people being their absolute worst selves. In the wake of the San Diego shooting, here are some of the comment categories that stood out to me as repeated themes:

• On posts by Jews or Jewish institutions condemning the shooting, ostensibly Jewish people blasting the condemnation because Muslims have it coming and Jews should never defend them even from terrorist violence.
• On posts about how the shooter harbored antisemitic views, non-Jewish people blasting Jews for "making it all about you" (what?).
• On any post by anyone, saying this all traces back to Israel.

Again, these were not isolates -- these were categories. I'd see comment after comment like this. The inescapable feeling was grief, anger, and despair over how awful my fellow humans are. It took effort to remind myself that this is not in fact all humans, it is a very limited and non-representative subset. But it was, again, damaging me to keep reading these. When one is swamped with instances of people being terrible, it makes you more terrible too. Even though I know that most people's responses to San Diego shooting are normal, it hacks your brain into thinking that this is how the world is.

That's what Facebook is these days -- an algorithmic machine that tries its level best to make people the worst versions of themselves because that sort of person will engage more. Such a price would be too much to pay even if Facebook was useful as a catch-up tool with old friends -- which it isn't.

And sure, to some extent this is a problem with all social media. But not like this. I actually like Bluesky, and Reddit has been decent since I stay away from politics. Facebook really seems to be in a category of its own (perhaps along with X/Twitter, which I don't use at all anymore) in terms of the intensity with which it pushes awful messaging.

(It's one saving grace right now is that my reel algorithm is mostly handing me standup comedy clips from comedians I actually like. But to by honest, I suspect most of those clips are stolen bot reposts -- not the least because they're increasingly cutting off before the actual joke gets told. Even when you find something good, Facebook finds a way to make it awful).