IT’S OKAY MOM, IT’S JUST FACEBOOK
Is Facebook Wasting Our Time on Purpose?
Letting the algorithm be my guide
I see in my feed that an older Facebook friend of mine has commented “so ridiculous” on a video captioned “Clever way to clean your toilet.” The person who posted the video appears to be a helpful looking young mother. I decide to watch the video myself.
An anonymous hand enters the frame hovering above a toilet bowl and proceeds to drop a series of red water balloons into the toilet. Maybe this is the hand that belongs to the nice-looking-Facebook-woman. The hand then enters again and follows it up with a few white balloons and a few blue ones. How patriotic.
What follows is three entire minutes of this unnamed hand pouring a concoction of Lysol, Barbasol, OxiClean, more Barbasol (for safe measure), soap (once again in a variety of creative colors), dish detergent, Comet bleach and just about every obscure fluid in their kitchen and bathroom they could think of into their helpless toilet bowl.
If you’ve made it this far, bear with me.
The resultant conglomeration is a heaping, foaming, stagnant, terrifying, tie-dyed mound gurgling around inside of the defenseless ceramic friend that had withstood years and countless batterings of feces just to meet its end here — choking on a toxic potpourri of whatever this craven woman with an angelic face could find in her pantry. It’s a fate the poor toilet had never seen coming.
But nor did it see coming that anonymous hand — that terrifying aggressor — returning into the frame once again. This time it’s equipped with a pair of scissors. The hand hovers in frozen contemplation above the eruptive heap as what appears to be smoke emerges from deep within it. With the scissors in hand, it dives fearlessly into the murky depths of the volatile amalgamation.
One by one, the disembodied hand stabs violently into the water balloons who’d already spent their last few minutes crying out for a merciful death. To violate those most patriotic water balloons she’d found is hardly the worst crime I’ve seen committed in this video.
With what I can only assume is a sadistic laugh, she proceeds to flush the toilet one final time and watch it try its best to labor down that final, most heinous meal. Welp. Those are three minutes I’ll never get back.
In the past few years, I’ve seen more and more videos like this congesting the platform. It’s interesting and, I’ll admit, a little hilarious, to see some of my older friends traveling down some of these more innocuous rabbit holes. It certainly beats watching those few friends of mine crawling around in the lingering trenches of the QAnon conspiracies.
But just in the past few months, I’ve found myself watching more and more of these videos that are designed, not to entertain, not to inform, but to keep me engaged, even if it’s with an eyebrow dented in perpetual confusion.
One video I began to watch was a lifeless gender reveal party that stretched on for over twenty minutes. It wasn’t until those last three seconds that the gender was finally revealed. “Why did I just waste twenty minutes of my lofe [sic] on this!?” commented an irate senior.
I watched another video where a man spent a similar amount of time meticulously spray-painting an immaculate white wedding dress only for the net result to be a tie-dye almost as terrifying as the one that brought that woman’s toilet to its knees. The commenters were in firm agreement that it was atrocious. But, lo and behold, we still wasted enough time to at least find out for ourselves.
Yesterday in my feed I watched a scene depicting a realistic, violent shooting from a movie. I think it was Swedish. I watched it not because I was entertained, not because I enjoy gratuitous violence, but because I was engaged. I wanted to see what happened next.
The next recommended video was a clip from the show “My 600 Pound Life.” It was an oddly agreeable change of pace from watching Swedens flee for their lives. These aren’t the sorts of shows I ever seek out, but imposed on me with a particularly intriguing clip from an episode — sure I’ll spend 12 minutes of my time learning about some of the struggles of the morbidly obese. Thanks Facebook.
The next one that was recommended to me was a laboriously monotone summary of a macabre movie where a child got killed unintentionally by his friend with a stick. The video neatly condensed into eight minutes the plot of this movie I never knew existed before just a few seconds ago — I had to at least stick around to see how it ends.
The robot narrator at one point in the summary referred to the main character’s mother as “my mother.” This summary was clearly written in broken English. In the vast world of creativity, how did this even end up in front of me? I’d probably only be hammering in a sorely beaten nail to point out that money had something to do with it.
I hadn’t realized until a couple of days ago just how flagrant this profiteering on Facebook could be. They‘re likely the worst offenders of the social media giants. The other day, I posted a reel to Facebook that managed to garner 1.8K views within its first hour.
I then got a prompt that I could pay to promote it. But when I ignored the notification, that video I’d posted was suddenly dead in the water. It stagnated at 1.8K views. But people lying to you about how to clean your toilet? That video has 80K comments alone. Its view count isn’t shown, but I can assume that thousands and thousands of hours have been wasted watching this woman murdering her victimless toilet.
On one hand, it‘s all pretty comical — in a dystopian sort of way at least. But on the other, it represents a serious danger that, when given a tool like the boundless sum of all that’s known, Facebook instead has us blearily learning bad toilet hygiene, watching realistic massacres and listening to robots summarize movies we’ll never watch.
But we can either wallow in it or revel in it.
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