Why Is Facebook Just Shrimp Jesus?
A new paper provides some answers.
Hi,
If you’re anything like me, your Facebook feed (yes, I still go on there to find people for stories, and keep in touch with obscure friends) is mostly just composed of AI insanity.
It’s either women in skirts near mud:
Old ladies obsessed with peach filling:
Or the more recent Jesus inspired crustacean material:
I’ve written about this on Webworm before — looking at how “cute” AI images of animals bled into something much, much darker:
Now a study out of Stanford has zoomed in on the wider problem, getting to the root of why social media is being overrun by horrific AI art.
Stanford’s Cyber Policy Centre studied 120 Facebook Pages that posted 50 or more images each, which led to a combined engagement in the hundreds of millions:
Common themes for content across the Pages we studied included at least 43 Pages posting AI-generated houses or cabins, 25 posting AI-generated images of children, 17 posting AI-generated wood carvings, and 10 posting AI-generated images of Jesus.
If you use Facebook… chances are all of that will sound very familiar.
You can read the whole paper here, but in short the entire purpose of the pages is to get your attention, before taking you to websites that are not Facebook, in order to sell you products that don’t even exist, or to get your personal information so you can be spammed with other rubbish.
Spam Pages largely leveraged the attention they obtained from viewers to drive them to off-Facebook domains, likely in an effort to garner ad revenue. They would post the AI-generated image often using overlapping captions as described in Finding 1, then leave the URL of the domain they wished users to visit in the first comment under the image.
For example, a cluster of Pages that posted images of cabins or tiny homes pointed users to a website that purportedly offered instructions on how to build them. Other clusters used AI-generated or enhanced images of celebrities, babies, animals, and other topics to grab attention, and then directed users to heavily ad-laden “content farm”
Of course the whole thing showed what a sham Facebook is — as these AI generated images are just shown in your Facebook feed whether you follow the pages or not.
We suspect these high levels of engagement are partially driven by the Facebook recommendation algorithm. In 2022, Alex Heath reported on an internal memo by Facebook President Tom Allison about planned changes to the algorithm that would “help people find and enjoy interesting content regardless of whether it was produced by someone you’re connected to or not.”
The study noted that while some images are created to look fake (shrimp Jesus), a lot of the images are being believed. Think log cabins, and all those old ladies eating birthday cake. Yep — people think they’re real and engage with them as such.
The overall takeaway: You are seeing all these AI images because Facebook gives zero shits about what you see, or if you’re being scammed. More eyeballs on the spam pages just means more ad revenue for Meta.
Webworm Weekly Roundup
We’ve been doing some really fun episodes of Flightless Bird lately. Today is our Lord of the Rings special, in which I visit Hobbiton, and talk to the then-child actor Liv Tennet about her viral “Where’s mama?” moment.
I’ve also done episodes about New Zealand’s favourite fruit (the feijoa), America’s worst smelling tree, the giant store that is Costco, and the weird origins of Smokey Bear.
Finally, a cool thing happened over the weekend — Jason Pargin (who wrote John Dies at the End) did a really fun review of my 2016 documentary Tickled over on his TikTok.
He has about half a million followers, so it’s a fun way for a new audience to find the film. Maybe I will finally make my millions (I think it’s free on Plex and a bunch of other places, so my plan is off to a bad start).
For anyone new to the world of Tickled, the 20-minute followup we did for HBO — The Tickle King — is free on YouTube.
I’ve also written a bunch of stuff on Webworm about Tickled, including stuff we didn’t get to include in the film:
This is only for paid up Webworm members (this thing has to survive somehow as journalism crumbles!) so either sign up —
— or if you want to get more involved in Webworm but don’t have the money, email me your situation and I’ll sort you out — davidfarrier@protonmail.com.
The Webworm community is growing and fun, as you can see with this AMA I did a few weeks ago (over 200 questions answered and I had a blast!)
Also if you missed it — Hayden Donnell wrote about why bosses are nearly all buffoons, and Tony Stamp wrote about how algorithms are eating our culture.
Thanks for being here, your eyeballs, and your support. Webworm is my favourite thing to do.
David.