The major reason I’m done with Facebook

There are a few people whose slop posts consistently show up on my feed. Not surprisingly these people are around my age so they fall into the "Know It All Boomer" category.

The major irritant for me is that these people think like it is 2005 while we are living in 2025.

They have a rudimentary knowledge of the "internet" but they cannot discern fact from the corporately curated nonsense they are flooded with on a continual basis.

The constant barrage is evident in the political slop on this platform but the public sentiment manipulation goes much deeper.

Just a year or so ago Jaguar launched a provocative Ad campaigned that the Boomers hated. That was the point. The campaign was designed to scream that things are different now.

Of course, the Boomers (All over the Internet) called it woke and said it was destined to fail.

In reality it was a major success. People talked about the brand, more than they had in years.

Fast forward to this past summer, Jaguar was in the "news" again for firing the Ad agency that authored the "woke" campaign.

Of course, the usual suspects had to come onto my wall and talk shyte about “going woke and going broke”. I countered with facts. The campaign performed as designed, the company is newsworthy again and there is no evidence that the Ad company was fired. I also urged the perpetrators to look up the facts and show me the evidence. All they could come up with was AI driven slop. Slop that inevitably led back to the same dubious source. I illustrated their errors and they blew me off.

I told them I had inside knowledge of the campaign and directed them to several articles on reputable platforms that provided evidence to the contrary of what they believed. They were unconvinced, the AI based reinforcement of the single source post was too much for their old school brains to overcome.

Finally I resorted to my Trump card, nah I don’t like that term, let’s call it the Right Bower. I had to share texts between myself and a member of the Jaguar marketing team. These texts explicitly said that the Ad agency was not fired and things are proceeding as planned. With that evidence, the perps skulked off, but it wasn’t long before they were presented another hill to die on.

One of the features of Facebook is that the algorithm gives you what you want. It tells you what you want to hear and shows you what you want to see. If you don’t keep that in mind and look at things critically you are destined to fall into a rabbit hole of misinformation. This is not a bug, it is a feature and it works most effectively on “Boomers” but “Generation Jones” falls pretty hard for it as well.

This past summer American Eagle threw out an Ad campaign featuring Sydney Sweeney. Sweeney is the prototypical hot blonde with a big rack, so the hook in the campaign was some double entendres that could be seen as racist dog whistles. The genius part of the campaign however was that they seeded the “media” with some fake outrage. These online sources claimed that the woke left was outraged by the campaign and it was another attack on straight white people because… reasons.

As the poster child for the woke left, I was the target of a lot of dumb memes and posts about these facts. My counter was to remind the smug bastards of the Jaguar campaign and how they are not in a position to properly discern what was going on. I told them that nobody is complaining about the Ad campaign, it is all media hype to whip up the old farts on the right so they would by American Eagle stuff for their grandkids when back to school rolls around.

Once again they pooh poohed my arguments and evidence because it went against their belief systems. Unfortunately, I did not have any behind the scenes conversations to prove my point. It was not until today that evidence was produced to prove me correct once again. If they choose to look the people in question will find that I was right again. I explained what was going on, I presented evidence, but nobody cares. They believe what they want to believe.

This platform is so tainted that there is no way back. Facebook jumped the shark during the pandemic but it was still vital for some discourse and was a solid platform for some businesses. Those days are gone. There are other parts of the Meta universe that are still viable but not Facebook. The majority of the people who use it for the most part cannot tell fact from fiction and they don’t use the tools available to allow them to think critically.

And for that reason, I’m out. (See what I did there)