Comment by mirekrusin

Meta is $201B total revenue business, virtually all advertising.

Instagram is estimated to generate half of ad revenue.

WhatsApp and Messenger contribute relatively little to ad revenue.

So facebook.com alone must be generating around $100B revenue annually.

It's impossible that something generating this revenue is serving AI generated NSFW teens pics with botnets commenting on those pictures only.

Real humans must be engaging with real ads at massive scale to make this money.

Failure mode for people reporting "I didn't use fb for a while, then I come back and see adult-like dominated content" sounds like plausible explanation of ad revenue optimized algo with weak, singular signal.

It could also be just cold start problem where algo has zero engagement signal and yields thirst traps for { gender: male, age: ~30s, engagement_history: [] } state.

But it's hard for me to believe that - frankly it doesn't sound like the best output if you want to capture somebody who has real friends and family in their network, did the algo really learned that people with this input state click likes on pics like that?

Why not just serve engagement from friends network or even "wish happy birthday to X tomorrow" instead – sounds like better way to engage to me.

ps. I also don't use fb but I do login maybe once a year / every two years to double check I'm not hacked, can still login etc. When I do it I may spend few minutes scrolling and I can see just posts from my network (double checked again now, lgtm).

Whatever issue OP has, they probably should spend few minutes engaging, maybe just dismiss/click don't like/hide/whatever it is to signal they're not interested - algo should pick it up and their feed should look more like what they expect.

What's your explanation?