This company does not say it uses AI for sending spam.
Meta is working on fixing that. This is the basic message that the company sent in its update, where it admits that Facebook has too many spammy posts on the platform. In the update, the company writes that Facebook Feed isn’t always showing new and interesting posts that you want to see and enjoy. We are working on it. The company plans to “crack down” on the worst offenders. At the same time, Meta says it will reduce the reach of creators who post “long, distracting captions” and posts with unrelated or irrelevant captions. These accounts are no longer eligible for monetization. The company is taking “more aggressive” action against “spam networks that coordinate fake engagement,” including making the comments of these accounts less visible, removing Facebook pages that are “designed to inflate reach.” Meta is testing a feature that will allow users to anonymously downvote comments to label them as not “useful.” It is worth noting that Meta is continuing its efforts to make Facebook more attractive to “young adults” as the update was released. As part of their new attempt, the company has brought back a tab for friends’ content, a move that Mark Zuckerberg said made the platform more like “OG Facebook.” It’s also worth noting that Meta didn’t mention anything about the more persistent type of engagement bait that has emerged on Facebook throughout the last year. But one of the bigger persistent forms of engagement bait that has been plaguing Facebook over the last year is AI slop. This is the phenomenon, documented at length by the crew at 404 Media, that involves the circulation of bizarre, often nonsensical AI-generated images — such as the infamous “Shrimp Jesus” — that do nothing so much as drive engagement for people trying to make money on or off Facebook. What’s more, these spammers are often assisted in their efforts by Facebook’s own algorithm, which promotes the posts, researchers have determined. Engagement bait and AI slop aren’t the only types of low-quality content that has inundated users’ Facebook feeds in recent years. I see posts from pages that simply seem to screenshot old Reddit posts from r/AITA or rehash celebrity news stories about people I don’t follow or have any interest in on a regular basis. Most of the viral content on the platform is actually mundane and formulaic, designed to get millions of comments via requests to “amen” or solve simple math — something Meta might not be able to squeeze into its latest crackdown, but also isn’t necessarily the content that many Facebook users are actually enjoying. The company does acknowledge that it’s also trying to “uplift” the creators who are actually sharing original content by taking action against accounts that are simply stealing that content. But given how much easier it is to create AI slop than to produce and share good original content, it might be a long time before Meta gets the spam problem under control.
