I haven’t looked at FB for a while, other than looking up a recipe site or yoga site, but now every day I seem to see reels of demented looking women with boobs the size of weather balloons, in t-shirts or bras, jumping up and down while sticking their tongues out. Are they advertising something? Is this a popular thing now? I am so out of the loop, but I think it’s sad and gross.
I don’t know. But, now I want to start watching Facebook Reels.
It’s probably the FB algorithm promoting reels which are popular. As it happened with you, these reels are so bizarre that people watch them and click on them because they are so crazy. This causes FB to promote the reels more, which means more and more people interact with them and they get promoted more. The people who make reels want as much exposure as possible to maximize ad revenue and have their accounts promoted as much as possible. They’ll do whatever they can to get people to interact with their videos. What you personally can do to avoid them is to not interact with them at all. That means even scrolling them off the screen as quickly as possible. FB keeps track of how long the reels were on your screen even in your news feed. If you pause on the reel to watch it, FB will give you more reels that are similar and and promote it more on other people’s newsfeeds. To get reels that are more relevant to you, watch reels that you are genuinely interested in. For instance, watch reels about recipes and yoga and FB will show you those reels more often.
I’ve not seen such reels pop up but I am not in the stares-at-boobs demographic. It’s just you - you have triggered the algorithm.
You might be tripping the algorithm by FB NOT knowing enough about you. If it doesn’t know your age and gender and you have managed to block FB tracking and don’t follow any corporate profiles or interest groups, you may just be getting what is most popular reels in general which I would imagine is bouncing boobies.
@filmore is right - you need to seek out reels that appeal to you to get more reels that appeal to you. Even if you don’t want to ever watch reels you’re going to keep getting these types of reels until you train FB to show you something else.
I have reels blocked by FB Purity on my desktop but I don’t think you can avoid them in the FB mobile app. Somehow I lucked out and got sent the most benign stuff. I actually started watching them and it’s very clear that they will keep showing me more of the same benign stuff (hair transformation, cake decorating, miniature making, furniture restoration and now extreme cleaning).
Before I started having reels blocked by FB Purity I was constantly getting reels of scantily clad females showing off their asses, either shaking them or walking away from the camera. While I will admit to having an appreciation of a well-shaped female posterior, I have no idea how FB knew this. It’s not like I discussed it on other FB posts.
You watch one such video and they think they have you pegged. I’m ashamed to tell you what Instagram thinks I’m into.
One way that social media decides what to show you is based on what people similar to you interact with. For instance, if the site only knows your age and gender, then you will automatically be shown content that many other people of similar age and gender watch. That means a 40-year-old male will initially be shown stuff like car repair videos (or perhaps scantily clad women) even if he has no interest in those things. Then based on how he personally interacts with the content, the content will become more tailored to his personal interests.
Also, sites like FB have info about you based on other sites they own, like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. Even if you have different usernames in those services, the cookies and IP addresses gives FB a way to link your use across those services together. If you follow lots of makeup tutorials on Instagram, FB will know to show you makeup reels in Facebook. Through IP tracking, social media and ad sites will show ads based on what anyone on that IP address has looked at. For instance, if one person in a household is looking at stoves, all people in that household may start to see ads for stoves show up in their browsers. Facebook may show everyone in the household reels about stoves because one person looked at stoves. So content in FB is not just from what you’ve personally done in Facebook itself. Content in FB may be tailored to you from a variety of bits and pieces about you it’s been able to cobble together from across many different services.
If a subgenre of Reels videos emerges where gigantically endowed women jump up and down while staring at their cellphones and attempting to enter elevators, I may have to switch from FB to Capybara TV.
I had nearly this same question a year ago
I was constantly trying to hide, block, remove or whatever I could.
My (not completely satisfactory) was to actually ‘like’ things that were not of the sort. So now I get things related to tying knots, Calvin and Hobbes, and walking in the woods.
Huh, I don’t get any such suggested groups on FB.
FB thinks I just want to see exotic plants and puppies*. 
*I don’t really want to have anything to do with our former real estate agent but he keeps popping up as a “suggested” friend.
I have a Facebook account in my real name. Besides friends I have met in different ways, some family members are in my friens list. I belong to groups (not their actual names because I don’t feel like looking them up) 1980’s Cartoons And Toys, Antique Computers And Electronics, Yiddish Lovers, Weird And Wonderful Second Hand Finds, the travelling synagogue congregation I like (I have known the rabbi since the nineties. He is wise, learned, compassionate and generous- a real mensch) and two neighborhood groups I joined when I moved.
If I wanted to join some group dedicated to scantily clad women, or something like that I am not going to do it on Facebook. It would be under my real name. There is significant risk of some friend or relative on my friends list seeing things I’d prefer they not see.(See Footnote) Finally, I have heard that many Facebook groups do not actually enforce many of the rules. AFAIK, nudity and sexually explicit material is not allowed even in private groups. Even though the admins of many groups apparently don’t enforce or even bother mentioning this rule, at any time a Facebook worker or program can access the group’s content, delete it, dissolve the group, and issue warnings or ban users.
Footnote- While I was visiting family in Florida, my sister noticed a recurring charge on Mom’s account. My sister told me to look at all the apps on Mom’s phone, find the app that was charging her each month, and find out how to cancel. I said I didn’t want to. She told me to just do it. I saw many things I did not want to see. I want to forget them. I cannot forget. Before anybody asks- you don’t want to know. Even if you did, I’d really rather not say.
Moderator Note
Please refrain from non-factual answers in FQ until after the question has been addressed factually.
Also, we have been trying to reduce the misogyny on the board for some time now. Posting about wanting to see boobs doesn’t help that cause any, especially in a fact-based forum.
You have a point. I apologiz and will strive to do better in the future.
Moderating
While questions about how Facebook’s algorithm works are factual enough, how to deal with the situation in the OP and suggestions for how to reduce unwanted content are more of an IMHO topic.
Moving thread from FQ to IMHO.
Any factual information about Facebook’s algorithms are of course still welcome.
Yes, apparently you have to watch at least a certain length of time. Also a thumbs up will help, so I heard.
Somebody else was just asking about them recently:
I don’t do anything on FB. FB defaults to “male”, so my recommended reels were scantily-clad women, and my “people you may know” were all 18 year old russian sex workers (well, that’s what they looked like).
Then one day, one fateful day, I watched a reel about a model railroad. Now that is all I get. Have never watched another.
Mama told you not to come.
When I first started getting reels many of them were labeled as “yoga” but the poses shown always were of young ladies with their posteriors pointed towards the cameras. I had never watched reels before I started getting these (in fact, I barely knew what reels were) and had certainly never expressed any interest in yoga.
I should clarify.
The “she” here is my sister. Mom welcomed help from me, my sister, or my SIL. It was my sister, who is often (in my view) controlling and often seems to feel that I have ‘had it easy’ while she was ‘taking care of Mom’., who insisted that I look through the apps and passwords on Mom’s phone.
This will be added to list of things I hold against my big sister.
Maybe I should:
I seen so many things I ain’t never seen before
Don’t know what it is, I don’t wanna see no more
Mama told me not to come
Mama told me not to come
She said, (“That ain’t the way to have fun, son”)
not the best joke…