The main facebook page is littered with groups urging me to “Follow” them. I don’t follow anyone. A maddening amount of them feature scantily clad women. I “hide” and “block” these, but they still show up. I was hoping the algorithm would get the hint that I don’t want to see a girl’s ass as she is bent over a car; or a comically endowed cartoon drawing. Yet they still show up. Is there a way to effectively change settings or do something to limit such posts that I see? Its as bad as the plethora of robocalls I get.
Maybe if I actively click on ones that aren’t of this genre, the algorithm will overwelm me with those at the expense of the trash? but I also am not fond of participating to feed the data collection machine.
Are these ads or “people you may know” or getting posted to groups you’re part of? Are they just randomly showing up in your feed as entirely standalone posts?
Granted, between FB Purity and multiple adblockers, my facebook page doesn’t show me a lot of extraneous junk, but this isn’t a problem I’ve seen in a long time.
I’d suggest you start by trying to figure out how they’re ending up in your feed. If they’re posted by a group your part of, unfollow/unlike the group. If it’s FB Friend’s pages that are getting hacked, unfollow (even if it’s temporary) them.
Also, go to your privacy settings and start unchecking everything that FB has decided you like.
Finally, if you still can’t get it under control, try FB Purity. I believe it’s only a FF/Chrome extension, but it does a good job of removing a lot of the stuff you’re not interested in seeing.
I was going to suggest that some of it might be coming from cross-site tracking and might be related to activities happening on other sites that makes their algorithm think that stuff would be right up your street.
I was going to suggest that, but then I would have to figure out how it explains Facebook relentlessly recommending pseudoscience pages to me for what seems like forever now.
I don’t know the ‘right’ names off the top of my head, but you can get a facebook container extention that keeps facebook from being able to track what you’re doing everywhere else. You’d be surprised at how many websites suddenly have a problem when they think you’re not logged into facebook.
I was getting the same sort of garbage as the OP. If you hit the three dots at the top, right of the post … then select “Less of this” it seems to work - I haven’t been seing them since. Not sure if its any more complicated than that.
I am not part of any groups. I am not friends with anyone. They are not ‘ads’ in the traditional sense…just some random things that pop up on my main page…some of them have a blue “follow” others say ‘suggested for you’
The little 3 dots … drop down to say things like Hide Post; Snooze (example:Celeb Gallery);Hide all; Block.
I tried Hide post for several days…then I tried "Hide All from (celeb gallery) for several days; and Block (celeb galery)…
Maybe those particular ones go away, but theres more that just keep showing up.
Maybe I just have to constantly do it. I wonder if little kids or women see this…or maybe because I don’t have any set friends or feeds that I click on, the default is to send this crap to me.
WAG is that at some point you looked at something that caused it to start feeding these pictures to you.
Go into your settings and uncheck everything it thinks you’re interested in. I’d give you better directions than that, but they change what it’s called and where it is on a somewhat regular basis.
But if you’re on a PC, install FB Purity, it makes a world of difference.
For myself, Facebook kept making Friend suggestions for random scantily clad women (that I suspect were phishing accounts) and putting similar content in my Feed. I noticed that many of these Friend suggestions kept saying that a particular person was a mutual friend. He legitimately seemed to be friending all these weird accounts. I unfriended him, and Facebook stopped offering this content.
If you don’t have any Facebook friends, then it would not be the case for you that it is trying to present content your friends seem to like. Changing you own Feed Preferences might help.
Here is Facebook’s own advice for managing your Feed Preferences.
To manage how content ranks in your Feed:
Click your profile picture in the top right of Facebook.
Click Settings and Privacy then select Feed
Click Reduce.
Click on the type of content you want to manage.
Select Don’t reduce, Reduce (default), or Reduce more and click OK.
Choosing Don’t reduce means that type of content won’t be demoted and could appear more often in your Feed. If you select Reduce (default), the default demotion strength will apply to that type of content. If you choose Reduce more, that type of content will be demoted about twice as strongly.
Note: Don’t reduce is age-restricted and not available to Facebook users whose age setting is below their country’s age of majority.
If you don’t mind Facebook knowing a few harmless things that you do like, maybe search for a few Facebook pages that actually hold some interest for you, and then mark them as liked. That might reduce the unwanted content, at the expense of Facebook knowing something about you. You may then be able to set your Privacy options so no one else can see what you have Liked.
AI has made this problem worse, in that endless photos of scantily-clad fake women can easily be generated. So now we are getting botnets flooding social media with this crap. Also, AI can be used to create increasingly sophisticated botnets…
If this is Facebook on your computer, then I would recommend you download FBPurity. It has all sorts of settings that allow you to block stuff on your feed. I block all group invitations. (It also, by default, blocks ads, and will let you block “Sponsored posts”).
I unfortunately do not know an equivalent that works on the mobile site or app. That said, my recommendations are nearly always 90s kid entertainment related stuff. I do note that one thing I did was remove my gender from my profile, which seemed to cut down on the number of spam friend requests I get.
Favorites (no results)
Snooze (4 things I’ve snoozed while trying to solve this problem)
Unfollow people and groups (no results)
Reconnect (you haven’t unfollowed anyone)
What do you use FB for? Maybe it’s worth getting rid of this account and setting up a new one with a different email address so you can get a fresh start.
I think this is the problem. The FB algorithm needs to feed you something, and with no preferences to go on these are the highest scoring defaults. Either select a few things you are interested in or make up a fake persona and feed it garbage.
But as someone said above, what are you using FB for? If you don’t follow anyone or have any friends, what would be the best things FB could show to you?
Second hearty endorsement for FB Purity–whenever I see someone else’s Faceplant page I’m absolutely aghast at how shitty it looks. Mine is one column, no bullshit on the sides, almost all of the Facebook pushing elements are gone and definitely no ads or half naked people. It’s pretty awesome.
