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Comment by disillusioned

5 days ago

Just click search on Instagram and BAM, thirst trap central. Don't have to have ever interacted with ANY of them, liked any of them, or follow anything CLOSE to that content, it's coming for you if you're a male between the ages of 18-99 that, presumably, the algo thinks is straight-leaning.

My _feed_ on Instagram is a bit more curated and sticks closer to that curation: weird music stuff, weird instrument stuff, and because I show my daughter a lot of it, Broadway musical stuff/BTS content/other actually interesting/cool stuff. So generally speaking my IG feed is curated and good. My FB feed is still trash; it feels like it casts a much wider net, but I've also been proactively following accounts that interest me on IG and don't do that much at all on FB (except some stand up comedians, since the format is actually really good for casual bite-sized scrolling).

But IG search... woooooo boy, it's _wild_. I have to hide my phone away from my daughter when I'm trying to pull up a specific account because the search interface is completely bikini-clad crazy thirst content. And again, I've literally never engaged or interacted or even really _lingered_ on any of those posts. It just goes for it.

4 comments

disillusioned

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wedog6  5 days ago

One of the creepiest aspects of this is that the 'thirsty content' is mainly mainly AI-generated pictures by spammers who know what they are doing, but also includes 'correlated' posts by normal users.

Eg you have a 15-year-old daughter and post a picture of her smiling in school uniform on Instagram because it's her birthday or something. The algorithm takes that post and shows it to randomly selected men who often interact with pictures of attractive female teenagers, even though none of your other posts get shared like this outside of your connections.

  • alsetmusic  4 days ago

    > The algorithm takes that post and shows it to randomly selected men who often interact with pictures of attractive female teenagers, even though none of your other posts get shared like this outside of your connections.

    What evidence suggests this?

    I don't use any Meta services and I absolutely hate them and consider them evil. I know they do awful, terrible things and if someone has evidence of this I will believe it given Meta's track record. But this is far enough outside my current understanding of the awful things that they do, or people claim they do, that it needs a source.