13 ms·

Ask HN: Is it just me or Facebook is being bombarded by spam?

104 points by dondraper36 4y ago

I have noticed that my timeline is full of thousands of random posts on celebrities' account pages. Based on other comments to some of them, I am not the only one. I checked my account's activity log and security settings just in case but everything is fine. Do you experience the same?

jeffwask 4y ago
They changed their core purpose and the algo that supports it from being a tool to stay in touch with friends and family to a delivery system for ads and paid content.
zinekeller 4y ago
Not just you: https://twitter.com/search?q=facebook+until%3A2022-08-25+since%3A2022-08-24 https://twitter.com/search?q=facebook+until%3A2022-08-25+sin...
bobkazamakis 4y ago
Have to imagine they're trying to less aggressively order posts by engagement, and as a result this is what bubbles to the top.
thorin 4y ago
Yes, as usual hn answers my own question in quick time! Will be interesting to see how long it takes them to sort this one.
bootloop 4y ago
I think the algorithm is broken and it just shows all posts of liked sites.
boffinism 4y ago
https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23319552/facebook-bug-celebrity-spam-memes-carnage https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23319552/facebook-bug-cel... - media picking up on it
- b112 4y ago
  The turkey sandwich in those photos looks great, delicious, but makes me think of spam/pretentiousness. The tomatoes are too thick, and will cause a mess when eating. They are that thick IMO for appearance sake, not for flavour sake. I only need so much of berries on my sandwich! And it uses those purple onions, which I suspect I see everywhere because they are pretty, and show in pictures better, not for flavour. And the cheese and meat are hanging off the bread on purpose, after all, the camera must see them! Never mind that it makes eating more difficult. Yup, even the spammy turkey sandwich pic is all pizazz, hype, shallow appearances. Bah.
LordAtlas 4y ago
Oh thank goodness, I'm not the only one.
napolux 4y ago
And you didn't check instagram. if you use hashtags you're spammed by bot comments
hellweaver666 4y ago
It's in their "reels" as well... every fifth video is a rip off of an existing popular reel either promoting free Robux or 18+ content. The whole platform is just riddled with spam at the moment.
dusted 4y ago
Everything is.. Internet is weird.. The past months, I've had people subscribe to my youtube channel and comment on my videos.. I don't upload very interesting things, and only rarely.. I created the channel in 2006, so it's definitely weird that now in 2022, people would start to notice.. much more likely to be spam and bots.
- bombcar 4y ago
  They’re evading the spam filters by trying to appear “real” before going on a spam binge. They’ll do things like repost comments from other videos to similar ones, etc. pretty pernicious.
  - dusted 4y ago
    I greatly feel this is it.. Probably an army of underpaid people actually having to watch content to make realistic-sounding comments.
gambiting 4y ago
Yep. My feed is now an endless scroll of ads and "recommended" channels which are literally also just ads. As an experiment I counted once - had to scroll past 30 of these ads/recommended posts before I was finally shown a post from a friend or a group I was actually a part of.
- vips7L 4y ago
  1 out of every 4 posts is an ad nowadays.
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    It's certainly higher than it used to be, but I doubt many users would tolerate anything that high. I just did a quick scroll through my feed (first in a while) and it was pretty much what I expected to see. From comments I'm reading in this thread I can only assume FB have been doing some sort of A/B testing. Luckily for me I seem to be in the control group. Maybe because I only check my feed once a week or so...
    - vips7L 4y ago
      For me it is literally 1/4 posts are an ad.
- intrasight 4y ago
  Your friends presumably don't post ads. So filter out things that aren't from your friends.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Facebook really wants you to scroll past no more than 5 posts. It will chose the "best 5" by some algiorthm, and after that it is mostly garbage. Their best 5 algorithm isn't very good, it finds the most important stuff (a friend had a new baby - these get a lot of likes), but will miss most of the next level down. Then it descends into memes that people share instead of the actual life people live.
- thenoblesquid 4y ago
rswskg 4y ago
I'm going posts from groups I'm not in and have no interest in. None from the actual groups I'm in. Beyond pointless and useless.
totetsu 4y ago
related? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32245146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32245146 The discussion about the Sunset of the Social Network, where you'll see less of your friends posts.
Lucasoato 4y ago
That's absurd, I'm in Facebook and Instagram mostly to check what's happening to my friends, not some random dude thousands km away. Do they really think that changing the algorithm in this way is going to help them in the long term?
lou1306 4y ago
Yes! I noticed the same thing this very morning. Absolutely appalling that they managed to botch the timeline so bad. How could anyone in their right mind believe that I may ever want to see things that random strangers post on those pages?
pjc50 4y ago
Facebook - and indeed every other content posting system on the internet - is always being bombarded by spam. It seems the spammers have briefly found a gap in the wall and are pouring in. This is your regular reminder that if you want a decentralized anything, you need to solve the spam problem again, which means censoring content.
- junofan 4y ago
  Spam needs censorship? But isn’t spam only profitable at scale? Can’t you just charge a nominal fee or something?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pjc50 4y ago
    I'm reminded of https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt which is 20+ years old and remains true. > Spam needs censorship? Spam needs to be deleted or hidden by someone or something or your inbox/feed will be full of spam. Trying to manage this individually with keyword filters or even the more sophisticated Bayesian anti-spam is exhausting. > But isn’t spam only profitable at scale? Yes. So what? Spam scales. It's like cryptocurrency, you burn trillions of FLOPS of computing power to make a few cents. > Can’t you just charge a nominal fee or something? Fee? For Facebook? This absolutely kills customer acquisition. It has often been suggested and never worked; the only site I think that does it is Metafilter? Facebook went in the other direction with subsidised data plans that were free to access Facebook. The economics does not permit them to charge the eyeballs to look at Facebook. On the other hand, they can't afford to let people advertise for free on Facebook, since that's the service they do charge for. In practice this is why accounts get tied to phone numbers so often, because it's slightly more difficult to acquire another few thousand phone numbers after the first thousand are banned for spamming, than it is with IP4 addresses.
    - stevage 4y ago
      It seems so weird that we all happily pay $5 or $10 a month for a bunch of random services, but a central platform like Facebook or Twitter can't even charge a buck?
dvfjsdhgfv 4y ago
They're not being bombarded by spam, just increasing revenue without even pretending anyone is checking these 'ads'.
- classified 4y ago
  FB is on the descending end of the hype curve. Maybe they're just trying to squeeze out the last drops of revenue before it dies.
baby 4y ago
Yes same here. If a facebook engineer is reading this, you need to offer a "updates from my friends" timeline, separate from the rest. Make facebook a useful tool again, and add additional functionalities in a non-ambiguous way (so either not to the timeline directly, or in another tab) Oh and, bring back a clear way to make the timeline chronological. This is the first sign that facebook is not designed to be useful, but designed to increase engagement. Let users choose. Power users will tweak their timelines and make it chronological, while others will continue to use the default way.
- wwweston 4y ago
  They did offer this for a long time -- you could make friends lists, and then use them to focus on updates that belonged to those friends. You can still make friends lists, but sometime in the last 2 years or so, they removed the feature to focus on updates from friends, and the friends lists don't do anything at all other than interact with privacy scope for your posts, which I guess is still nice. IMO FB long ago decided it was going to be guided by metrics rather than theories about utility. Maybe they know better what users want than users do themselves, or maybe they care about other things, either way, the days of power users are done here.
  - baby 4y ago
    Either we’re the long tail, or we’re the users they should listen to
- danwee 4y ago
  > Yes same here. If a facebook engineer is reading this, you need to offer a "updates from my friends" timeline, separate from the rest. That only benefits the user, it doesn't benefit Facebook... so why it would be implemented at all? Do we really think Facebook (and other big platforms) are doing what they do in order to benefit their users? Please, it's 2022, Facebook et al. don't have to beg for our attention/loyalty; they effectively do whatever the hell they want. The sooner we stop using their services the better for the internet.
  - 4y ago
vegai_ 4y ago
Yeah, it is as if they opened some sort of a sewer floodgate. My feed is a diarrhea of alt-right and communist propaganda right now, and everything in between. It was pretty bad before but now it's completely unusable.
nickip 4y ago
Events are 10X worse than timeline. Has anyone else noticed this? All the event pages are constantly being bombarded by scammers saying they have "tickets" to the event to sell because they can no longer go for X reason. On some popular events there's scam messages every couple minutes. Thousands of fake profiles posting with no details on the profile. Some are even more sophisticated and have rather full profile details. Most of the time they sell "online" tickets, but where I am from almost all the tickets are paper so its easy to spot the scammers.
idk1 4y ago
Yes, mine is almost 50% these types of scam ads - https://i.imgur.com/NH9Nd5j.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/NH9Nd5j.jpeg As everyone here can work out, Amazon's latest AI platform did not appear on the BBC news and it was not making banks scared. What's very strange is the url in the ad leads to a clothing website when typed in, and a MML pdf when clicked. Anyway to answer you question yes, mind is filled to the brim with these ads and only these ads.
- intrasight 4y ago
  Your friends presumably don't post ads. So filter out things that aren't from your friends.
reitanqild 4y ago
Not only outright spam it seems. A Norwegian in another forum wrote that he/she (I can't remember) had the timeline full of things like birthday greetings from people they didn't know to other people they also didn't know.
dandanua 4y ago
I keep blocking up to 10 pages of movies theme every day that Facebook keeps suggesting to me. For months already. I view it as extremely offensive and abusive behavior, since I don't follow any of such pages, even on others sites that can in theory track my behavior and share with Facebook. I guess we are joining the era of corporate techno-fascism, where mega corps don't care about actual wishes of people and just push ideas, narratives, sympathies, and other emotions which are suitable to them. F*ck those narcissistic billionaires that build "virtual realities" essentially to exploit the others. BTW, hyper-capitalism and democracy are obviously incompatible with each other. No wonder there so many different crises in the world right now.
speg 4y ago
It was a bug, and is now fixed.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  That was my suspicion from reading about it, but it seems a percentage of HN commenters love to attribute to malice what can adequately be attributed to incompetency.
TedShiller 4y ago
Has been like this since Facebook was created. This is not new
peachtree2 4y ago
Same thing here
peachtree2 4y ago
Same thing here, had to unfollow most celebrity pages to get away from the spam
philliphaydon 4y ago
Facebook is overrun by comment bots spamming propaganda for Russia and China at the moment. Literally any news article that can be related in any way back to Russia or China, or is about America is over run with how great Russia and China is and how Putin is a saviour and how America is going to collapse. Prior to Russian invasion into Ukraine it wasn’t so bad. But 2022 it’s got really bad.
- elzbardico 4y ago
  Have you ever considered that the world is a fucking giant place and that a lot of the people in the world and even in the US itself are not particularly happy with American foreign policies for quite some time? The western world is only 15% of the global population. There is a heck of a lot of people out there in Asia and the global south, who are going to cheerlead anything that seems to be in opposition to America.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  Oh I want to add. The amount of adverts for mobile games with video that’s not even closely related to the game is out of control this year too.
sudden_dystopia 4y ago
I don’t know as I don’t have a Facebook any more. But coincidentally, I tried signing up again the other day because I wanted to use the marketplace because Craigslist sucks these days. But I didn’t want to use my actual name because then I would have friends finding me and I would be subjected to all the nonsense and drama that caused me to leave in the first place. So I used a close derivative of my name and they suspended me. Long story short, seems like they have pretty good spam filters.
- Rudism 4y ago
  I also tried signing up for an account a while back when I got my Oculus Quest 2. I did use my real name, and they asked for all kinds of invasive personal information (including a scan of my driver's license and other forms of ID) and ultimately suspended my account too. So, to put a slightly different spin on your observation, they have pretty bad spam filters that happen to also be pretty good legitimate user filters.
adelarsq 4y ago
I am away from Facebook for some years. But yes, there are a lot of spam on it, even years ago. This was the main reason that I stop using, since a lot of content was irrelevant
joe_courted 4y ago
Relevant article from Ben Thompson: https://stratechery.com/2022/instagram-tiktok-and-the-three-trends/ https://stratechery.com/2022/instagram-tiktok-and-the-three-... This may very well Facebook experimenting with moving into 3 and 4 of Lessin's 5 steps in the article. Moving away from content based around friendships, and more towards professional and algorithmic content.
- indymike 4y ago
  >Moving away from content based around friendships, and more towards professional and algorithmic content. This will be the end of Facebook. The value prop is not algorithmic content, it's friends and family.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    > The value prop is not algorithmic content, it's friends and family. Friends and family posts don't keep you on the site for very long, reducing the number of ad impressions each user sees. The value prop is indeed in algorithmic content, but using "friends and family" as the hook.
    - indymike 4y ago
      > The value prop is indeed in algorithmic content, but using "friends and family" as the hook. What you are describing is bait-and-switch, which is unethical, in retail, illegal, and will result in long-term irreversible audience atrophy. Selling keeping in touch with friends and family and delivering clickbait is not a sustainable strategy.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  That's a big experiment. That's like google saying, hey let's make search crap and see how long we can coast before that becomes a systemic issue for us. hmmmmm I don't think this pivot will work.
  - walls 4y ago
jimsmart 4y ago
The BBC have just reported on it... "Facebook feeds flooded with celebrity spam" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62659681 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62659681
gwbas1c 4y ago
When I used Facebook, I would unsubscribe from celebrities when I would get that kind of thing. I find that Facebook tinkers with the algorithm far too much, IMO, based on whoever complains the loudest. It would probably behoove them to introduce more explicit controls instead of basing the whole thing on machine learning.
04rob 4y ago
Facebook/Meta has said it's a bug: https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23319552/facebook-bug-celebrity-spam-memes-carnage https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/24/23319552/facebook-bug-cel...
diogenescynic 4y ago
Go to any Facebook business page and so many reviews are clearly from fake profiles—-people who have no friends, no activity, and only have a picture of a dog or sunset for their profile picture. Facebook is really going downhill.
antifa 4y ago
Facebook also sends me endless notifications about random shit. They'll say "there have been 10+ new posts since the last time-" but the name of the group is cut off and pressing it goes nowhere.
BillyJoeLouBob 4y ago
People on HN use Facebook?! I was genuinely surprised by the number of responses here. I honestly thought that nobody uses Facebook anymore much less HN users.
GuB-42 4y ago
My feed is also terrible, even posts from good friends are terrible (as in: Facebook show me their worst). Lots of spam, chains, etc... I interact very little with Facebook, and while I have friends, I am not part of any group. It is essentially a "read only" thing, so I suspect Facebook algorithms couldn't profile me, and as a result they show me the most generic things.

dimva 4y ago
You pay for services where there isn't a network effect (streaming) or where the market isn't super competitive (telecom). Social is an incredibly competitive market with a huge network effect - if Facebook or Twitter charged money, young users would migrate somewhere else and would continue using that network when they got older. So that would be the end of any social network that decided to charge, unless it was trying to be a small niche network for adults to have more intellectual conversations (metafilter?)
lbriner 4y ago
There is the network effect where to make it worthwhile, you need to have pretty much all of your friends on it, if not, it doesn't work. Most people won't pay for anything they don't have to pay for. There is also the fact that it can be hard to see the overall gain when each interaction is very marginal. For example, updating your timeline with a photo and a status by itself doesn't seem worth paying for even if the cummulative effect over an entire year could be very beneficial for your networks.
- bluGill 4y ago
  Facebook might be valuable enough for me to pay for, but it is marginal. For every friend who decides to get off facebook the value of facebook also goes down. I wouldn't pay more than a buck/month for facebook, and to get that they need to focus on the things that provide me value (that is they need to show me more about the life of my friends and cut all the memes and political garbage that my friends share). However I never would have joined facebook if there was a price and for years after I wouldn't have been willing to pay, it is only now that I realize the ability to share pictures of my kids with my parents and other friends is a valuable service.
  - lukasyuy5 4y ago
pjc50 4y ago
Customers are funny like that. My own personal gimmick ideas for twitter, that will never be tried, would be "premium" which gives you abuse reporting that actually works (and maybe some other stuff), and a system to enable people to pay for premium (or part thereof) for other users.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

impossiblefork 4y ago

I don't see why decentralization would lead to a spam problem. Presumably you would hardly see messages that haven't been approved by someone who has been transitively approved by you. Decentralized systems are usually networks, and if you got spam or uninteresting messages you would reduce the weight of that part of the network. You can't trust a centralized party to censor for you, because then that entity has power over you through what you see. It has to be your secretary, i.e. it has to actually work for you and be a reliable servant. What better to use as a secretary than network of people connected by who is interested in the output stream from whom?

zinekeller 4y ago
looks at e-mail and SMS Sure you could install filters, but decentralised networks in practice has spam (the only ones that don't have any spam and don't have any filters are those too niche that spammers won't bother).
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  Then we have to checks notes - make every network niche! I quip, but I think there are solutions in that kind of thinking. Not everything needs to connect to everything.
- impossiblefork 4y ago
  Yes, but in both the case pf e-mail and SMS you are not looking at public streams, and neither uses a disyributed system. It uses a centralized system with a small number of telephone companies that are slow to respond to reports of spam. In a distributed system of the kind I propsed above, if you got a spam message you wpuld reduce your trust in those who transitively approved the source of the message, immediately. Someone spamming would be cut off quick, as would anyone with high trust in a spammer.
  - zinekeller 4y ago
    > In a distributed system of the kind I propsed above, if you got a spam message you wpuld reduce your trust in those who transitively approved the source of the message, immediately. I won't think too deeply if your solution works theoretically, but in reality in our imperfect world most people would just choose to outsource the job to the point that we're back to the email problem. Majority of people liked Gmail - majority chosed Gmail and spammers galore we have. Even Mastodon is not resistant to centralization despite their efforts to be decentralized - most wouldn't bother to set up their server and so a lot ends up signing up to mastodon.social.
    - TakeBlaster16 4y ago
      Parent's idea is called Web of Trust and it does work, but it doesn't have wide adoption for exactly this reason. For the average person it's too much work to curate their network, or to "debug" the chain of trust that let some spam slip by. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
      - impossiblefork 4y ago
        Yes, although I imagine continuous connection weights and for the trust to be based on upvotes and downvotes on the public comments of others, not something for cryptography or private messages.
  - bcrl 4y ago
    Email and SMS are very much distributed systems. There are many mail servers, and many telephone companies, cell phone companies and VoIP providers that can send SMS messages. With SMS messages the problem is quite similar to e-mail in that the protocol the network is built on (SS7) was designed in a time when all carriers that had access to the phone network were trusted. You've fallen into the naive assumption that spammers use the same identity for each piece of spam being sent out, which is simply not true. I get plenty of spam phone calls with fake phone numbers despite the fact that STIR/SHAKEN has supposedly been implemented. Forged digital identities are cheap. And if forged identities are cheap, there's no trust mechanism that can work. Presumably you'll counter by saying that you can simply assign a negative trust to unknown identities. In the real world there are plenty of us that have to communicate with people we haven't communicated with before (my business can't afford to turn away customers I don't already know), so we can't simply drop unknown identities. The spam problem is hard because identities are hard, and digital identities are doubly so. Time and time again has proven that simple hand wavey solutions do not work.
    - impossiblefork 4y ago
      No, I haven't. A message from an entity which has not yet sent a spam message does indeed have the save priorization characteristics as one from any other entity withour connections to anything, but presumably a new user is invited by someone. Furthermore, a new user could presumably say things on the spam-filled rubbish subforums, until he gets an upvote from someone who is trusted by somebody, and then after a while he becomes a participant. The readon you see problems is, I think, that you imagine a system of private, individual, communication, while I imagine an enormous public forum.
      - bcrl 4y ago
        You are failing to address a use-case that matters. As a result, your solution can't be adopted by everyone, and will therefore fail. You need to consider privacy concerns, as not everyone in the world wants to see their web of associations made public. Look at privacy laws in Europe and other countries to get a better idea of what is required. Writing code is dead easy if you remove all the requirements from users.
varispeed 4y ago
The spam may not be as dangerous as other types of attack - that is when spammer gets frustrated that they get blocked, they may go nuclear and post illegal content to the site and then report it to hosting provider and / or authorities causing problems to someone running the node. And if you don't have good measures to filter or prevent such content from being uploaded you are toast.
- impossiblefork 4y ago
  Yes, although I don't think a site as such is a good idea. Instead I imagine a WebRTC application connecting to many peers and exchanging text with them. The main website then has little to do with the content. Furyhermore, it's not like people can't post illegal content even if they can't spam. In a way, your readoning regarding it is like responding to a threat as if the person in question can't realize it even if his conditions are met.

samatman 4y ago

It means shunning users and avoiding Sybil attacks. If you can't avoid Sybil attacks, then you're stuck censoring content, and that's an unhappy job. Blockchain tech is good at one thing: making numbers expensive. That property has made them really unpopular, along with doing it by turning huge amounts of electricity into heat, but it's useful in that an identity is just a number, and if you can make identities allodial and somewhat expensive, you can solve the problem at the user level, by banning bad actors. If a user ID costs ten bucks, spammers have to make that plus labor back before everyone shuns them. That's discouragingly difficult to do.

sph 4y ago
Hashcash is a similar solution to make spam computationally intensive, but minimally invasive for regular users. Bitcoin's proof-of-work system is inspired by Hashcash. But yes, the solution to spam is to make it expensive: either monetarily or energetically.
- xeromal 4y ago
  If hashcash involves taking a penny or more from someone for it to work, it won't work.
- pjc50 4y ago
  I think bitcoin has proven that if the economic advantage of a proof-of-waste system is big enough you can create truly huge amounts of waste. I don't think we want to add that to spam. > the solution to spam is to make it expensive: either monetarily or energetically. This is used nowhere in practice? In practice, the solution is for a small number of dedicated central spamfighters to cooperate on lists of known spam IPs, or correlate across a large number of emails to produce statistical markers of spam.
- NotAdamBack 4y ago
  If this is not Adam Back I will eat my hat. The biggest mistake Satoshi made was including a reference to HashCash in his white paper
  - sph 4y ago
    This ain't Reddit, we can do without novelty accounts, especially to imply I am Adam Back. You have my blessing to eat your hat.