My unsanctioned research has concluded that as much as 50% of everything on Facebook is questionable, repetitious, unwanted or completely fake. For example, thanks to AI you can watch talking babies, talking dogs, squirrels pushing lawn mowers and the heads of beautiful women attached to someone else’s body, generally with huge…well, you know what they are.
There are countless posts that promise something that isn’t available
unless I click on the link in comments, so that hackers can infect me with a
Trojan virus and steal my password and contact list.
My news feed is filled with images of scenic bedrooms offering lake or
mountain views, tables with pastry and coffee looking out a window into the
rain, or foggy images of railroad stations waiting for a train. They’re attractive
images and I like looking at most of them, but they just aren’t real.
Then there’s the lists of Top 10 actors who got old, stayed
young, were actually lesbians, lost all their money, hated their costars, will
never work again or (fill in the blank), each read by narrators who aren’t real
people and can’t pronounce everyday words.
I see revolving but fake posts about sports heroes and
celebrities who gave $10 or $20 million to rescue pets, each with a different
photo but usually with identical words.
Daily there are at least five reminders that it’s the Gulf of
Mexico, maps of interstate highways that might not even be there and countless memes
of something stupid Trump said today on Truth Social.
I’ll get a dozen photos of Maria Sharapova in various states
of dress (not that I mind) and the female celebrity of the day. Today it seems
to be Susanna Hoffs. Or is it Kate Beckinsale? Or Marilu Henner? Linda Ronstadt
is a given, and I’m guaranteed about six photos of the Eagles.
Like the kid in that movie, I see a lot of dead people.
That’s alarming, because most of them are approximately my age.
Several web sites purport to offer news on WVU athletic
teams, but the content is either someone’s off-the-wall opinion or it’s
flat-out wrong.
Don’t get me started on conspiracy theories, comments from imaginary pro-Trump bots, reels that tease everything from sex to people injuring
themselves to missing music videos, or clips of Trump’s press secretary echoing
today’s latest lies, and on and on.
I admit I like the AI photos of Halloween and old fashioned
Christmas and spooky people in the fog. I’m chalking up most of the rest as
just so much B.S.
And finally, there are several strings of people I might
want to know. Note to Facebook: I know how to befriend people. If I wanted to
know them, most likely I already would.
There’s a whole lot more, but if you have read this far, you
probably wonder why I even go to Facebook every day. That’s a fair question.
I’m not really sure, except that I’m old, retired and bored most of the time,
and it’s a hard habit to break. Plus, I have friends there. It’s like going to
work every day and chatting with co-workers, except I can skip that whole “work”
thing.
Anyhow, I’ve decided to establish a baseline: Everything on Facebook is fake until it’s not. That should simplify things. Meanwhile, I can pretend I’m sitting in a Paris café, drinking coffee with a young Linda Ronstadt and looking out at the rain. We’ve got an hour before we have to catch our train, somewhere out there in the fog. We’ll be heading up to our cabin by the lake. Or is it the mountain?
Sorry. I forget.
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