What is your percentage?

I decided to analyse my Facebook doom-scroll feed recently as an exercise in telling myself how much I really don’t need Facebook in my life.

Basically, I tried to assess how much of what Facebook thought I should see and it presented to me was just pathetic mindless, worthless drivel. This is bearing in mind the algorithms all think they know me. But what they don’t realise is how much I actually enjoy being obtuse and my propensity to indulge recalcitrance.

As a man, I might have inadvertently paused longer than I should at some point in the past over a picture of an overly young woman with perky breasts. But this should not indicate that I require to see more of the same anymore than it should if I’d paused over a special offer for a front loading washing machine.

How dare some stupid gizmo that doesn’t know me and my current life situation just assume I prefer breasts and washing machines to more important things.

But further, the endless scroll-athon seems also to presume my stance on such aspects as politics, world events, conspiracy theories and so much more.

Why?

Well I can only assume every insubstantial thumbs up I might have ever given or past comment I might have made about some aspect of brexit, Palestine, digital ID, cash usage, virology, etc. or my pausing to see or read one thing or another extending back for years has been recorded and now tells ‘them’ everything they think they need to know.

The algorithms could of course be right to some extent but they take over. And besides what I once liked might easily have changed or evolved.

So having once perhaps paused a little too long at perky breasts or washing machines the algorithm now infuriatingly gives me more or the same ...well the washing machines are infuriating.

Without realising, and of my own free will, I have seemingly given them my profile by having been sucked into making some response or another or deciding to read about something or gaze at something slightly too long in preference to something else.

And the exact degree to which they think they know me automatically now adorns my feed with disproportionately high numbers of perky breasts and washing machines.

What can I do?

The easy thing is to abandon the stupid smart phone and ditch all forms of social media.

However, social media can supposedly be a useful tool in the promotion of something ...or at least we are led to believe this.

My suspicion is that social media actually does very little in this regard especially if you are trying to ‘push’ something that goes against a mainstream agenda — like say vaccine harm or like my promoting Reality of Illness.

So not only will your ‘pet’ cause get quietly stifled [shadow banned] by the algorithms, at the same time you will get to see more of the opposite brainwashing-type-posts to straighten you out.

So in the case of vaccine harm anything I share or post to a group of thousands gets a few measly emojis and comments, meantime I’m bombarded in my feed by so many glowing accounts of how wonderful vaccines are that I can hardly see the perky breasts any longer.

So the result of my news feed analysis shows I am clearly well above average or well below average depending on how you interpret the result.