A.I. Videos Have Flooded Social Media. No One Was Ready

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/08/business/ai-slop-sora-social-media.html

by xnx • 8 months ago

31 13 8 months ago

cebert• 8 months ago

I check Facebook a few times a week mainly to stay updated on family and friends and to wish the occasional happy birthday (I’m not a heavy user). Meta aggressively pushes AI-generated “slop” reel videos in my feed, which I mostly ignore. It’s depressing that there must be an audience for this low-effort content. The videos recommended to me are often AI reels featuring obese people doing something “unexpected.” They’re not particularly interesting, and they feel like they’re mocking people with weight issues which isn’t cool.

acheron• 8 months ago

Use the FB Purity extension in your browser. https://www.fbpurity.com

It’s a little janky, presumably Meta has a few developers constantly working to hinder it. But still can mostly get rid of that kind of crap.

vpShane• 8 months ago

I stopped using social media even to stay connected - I look at hacker news to stay up to date with tech, and reddit for cyber security related subs but the FBPurity I installed a year or so ago, and my account was still small just friends and family of maybe ~30-50 people. Mostly, for an animal shelter I volunteer at and community events.

Installing it, scrolling down was constant sponsor ads being blocked, reels of women from bot accounts that steal influencers' videos and repost them, new-age spirituality memes 'Let go of what does not serve you' and 'Return to Source to find your real self' - quotes from philosophers who never said the quote, 'How to hack' tutorial images -- all removed from fbpurity

I'd have to scroll for a minute before getting anything from the local community groups, the shelter's posts, and rarely did I see somebody else's post, and usually it was talking about Trump or politics or 'are we in a simulation?' but for the most part it's all brain rot.

Toxic, deceptive brain rot. There's no use trying to get others to exit the psychological magnet that has them hooked and doom scrolling and posting non-stop with their views.

The botfarms would plague every local community group and most people activity were calling out the bots. Bots swaying the comments on posts' comment sections for local news, people getting LIVID in the comments over trolls/bots.

Businesses being FB exclusive only with no Google presence, no maps presence.

Delete it, trust me, you'll be happier. There is no 'purity'

xnx• 8 months ago

Thanks for sharing. Also available to install from Google: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/fluff-busting-purit...

hackerknew• 8 months ago

"Department of Hindering the Plugin That Makes Facebook Into What Users Actually Want"

jakubmazanec• 8 months ago

https://archive.ph/uw7lG

add-sub-mul-div• 8 months ago

Fox News fell for a similar fake video, treating it as an example of public outrage over the abuse of food stamps in an article that has since been removed from its website.

Did they really "fall for it" or were they just laundering the intent to publish false information through incompetence?

thegrim33• 8 months ago

All major communication forums on the internet have been mass manipulated/poisoned by countries across the world for well over a decade now. A huge chunk of all internet speech is inauthentic. In my mind, AI videos really don't degrade the situation much further. The internet as a communication medium has already been completely compromised for a long time.

thejazzman• 8 months ago

Citation?

SapporoChris• 8 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

osn9363739• 8 months ago

What % of HN is bots/AI do we think? This is the only site I use that has any social part to it, and I'm beginning to think that many of the comments aren't real. I don't know if it's in my head - but it all feels off to me. Either that or it's just a different crowd from years ago.

red-iron-pine• 7 months ago

easily 30-40%. you could see trends even as far back as 2020. same patterns as with reddit.

e.g. bunch of old accounts with random bursts of activity, often posting to old / stale threads (e.g. 2-3 days old, when no one is looking at them), and often saying generic one liners or regurgitating summarizations of top / most upvoted points.

except when the posts were about some hot topic, bet you can guess which ones...

AWS AI Researchers put bot traffic as high as 50% across the internet in this study from June 2024: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.05749

insane_dreamer• 7 months ago

AI is destroying trust in society (already waning). The long-term consequences of that are quite frightening.

A.I. Videos Have Flooded Social Media. No One Was Ready

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