[captainkrtek]

Recently I needed to create a facebook account to join a group for some volunteer related work. I haven’t had a facebook account for probably 8 years.

I knew the memes that facebook has become a bit of a wasteland but I was genuinely shocked by how bad it is. The “new account” experience is wild, having zero friends on an account just results in a torrent of spammy content. Sexist comics, AI generated garbage, just repulsive..

[morkalork]

I love your username! I also had to make a fb account for work recently (after being off the platform since 2012) and even with a fake last name, work email and different phone number it managed to find and suggest as a friend: someone I went to university with _in another state_, who incidentally moved to the same city as me a few years later. There's no way they aren't maintaining shadow profiles and still accomplishing that. Aside from that, the feed is indeed an utter cesspool.

[RajT88]

They maintain a shadow social graph, where they suggest friends to you which are more than one hop away.

I've been seeing people suggested as friends who are my customers at work. My FB account is pseudonymous, and has nobody work-related as a friend.

So - a few possibilities:

1. Someone at work tried to look me up by my cell, and they were friends with this person. (less likely)

2. I had a Facebook tab open when I connected to the VPN, and then someone at work who was friends with that person got associated with my egress IP since they connected to same VPN endpoint (more likely)

I have tested the IP address theory. Profile 1 connects to your home wifi network. Profile 2 on different machine connects to your wifi network. You now get friend recommendations of Profile 1's friends on Profile 2.

Nothing would surprise me when it comes to how Facebook builds its shadow profiles / shadow graphs. I wouldn't be surprised if they bought from data brokers and had things like your SSN's and historical home addresses and everything.

[captainkrtek]

Díky! Yeah I had a similar experience as well, all the people it suggested were surprising.

[hnpolicestate]

I became interested in this clearly AI created "poorly" woman profile who would post just the most nothing questions "What's smells better, fresh baked bread or freshly cut grass?" That would have thousands of replies.

Least common denominator planet of doom.

[buescher]

Try youtube without an account or history. Even worse, on the smart tv in a hotel room.

[morkalork]

The smart TVs in shared we-work like meeting rooms are a gamble now. At least it's usually something harmless like paw patrol.

[oersted]

Yeah it's a MrBeast-esque hellscape

[imgabe]

My wife hadn’t had Facebook for years. She tried to make an account to use marketplace and it got immediately banned with no explanation.

I don’t know what’s going on with Facebook but I guess if you didn’t start using it 10+ years ago it’s too late now.

[aqfamnzc]

I'm in the same boat. Although I suppose I tried giving out as little legitimate information about myself as possible, so honestly I don't blame them too much for detecting somehow and blocking it (in my case specifically...)

[golol]

I have a similar situation lol, I used a Facebook account almost a decade ago which I lost access to (email). Whenever I try to make a new account it instantly gets banned as a duplicate.

[jjbinx007]

It's the same on Twitter/X, possibly even worse.

Instagram is a walled garden, as is LinkedIn.

I recently did the North Coast 500 miles around Scotland and when I was using wifi I was challenged often to prove I'm human. It got really tiresome and I ended up going back to mobile data just to avoid that.

Having access to a vast quantity of information at all times does not seem to stop authority figures from being ignorant of the law, anti-vaxxers from being ignorant of medicine or Flat Earthers from being ignorant of just about everything. It actually amplifies those groups.

I loved the olden days of the world and their dog having a personal website about whatever they wanted, which you could visit without being tracked or having to login. Oh, and I wish the Internet of Things wasn't still so shitty.

[llm_trw]

>Then, as the Obama Era unleashed a rogue-wave of cultural disintegration, birthing the modern Woke Era, with its attendant digital sequestrations and industrial-scale deplatforming, the ‘Web’ turned another critical corner in its descent toward moribundity. The now-dominant Big Tech Hall Monitors became riot-police and gatekeeper in one, smoting down the sunless pate of any poor schmo who dared lean an elbow on the hallowed sill of the ever-shrinking Overton Window.

Somehow I don't think you read the article.