Until a couple of months ago, if I had opened up the Facebook app on my phone you would have seen–in addition to posts from my real-life friends–recommended videos and reels featuring comedian Jim Gaffigan, old Seinfeld clips, and golf instruction tips. It would have been a perfect summation of what I spend my time watching outside of work. But something happened in mid-September that has changed the makeup of my social media feeds–and not for the better.
In preparation for a My Two Cents on the killing of Charlie Kirk, I watched a number of his videos to refresh myself with his schtick and how choosing to confront the mentally ill in public forums sowed the seeds for his own murder. Since that time, Facebook especially, but X/Twitter and Instagram as well have decided that I want to see nothing but videos promoting ideas the algorithm thinks those with a Charlie Kirk-type mentality want to see.
After watching the Kirk videos, I got, as you would expect, plenty more of his videos tossed into my feeds. To be honest, if you’ve seen one, you’ve pretty much seen them all. A liberal with issues shows up to defend their version of reality, Kirk shoots holes in it, it’s tightly edited to make Kirk look like the only rational one, we move on to the next video. It’s why those videos are such a hit with young people–no nuance to the discussion, jump cuts, everything said also on the screen as written words, done in 25-seconds because who can pay attention any longer than that?
But mixed in with those suggested Kirk videos were a whole of lot of what I will politely describe as “Black people acting badly”. Facebook was positive that I would like to watch doorbell camera footage of Black people stealing packages from porches, video surveillance footage of Black people taking part in smash and grab robberies at stores, body camera footage of Black shoplifters trying to fight security guards or loss prevention people in store parking lots, more body cam footage of Black people resisting arrest during traffic stops, cellphone video of Black people taking part in “street takeovers”–blocking traffic in large groups while cars drive recklessly across all lanes, and most-recently, cellphone video of Black women going nuts at the grocery store checkout line because their FoodShares card is being declined for their purchases.
Should you make the mistake of clicking on one of those videos, You can expect a deluge of not just that content but, for some reason, endless videos of “sovereign citizens” trying to foil police officers from issuing them simple traffic tickets, or trying to make claims to a judge that criminal charges against them are invalid because their name is capitalized in the criminal complaint or that the laws of the state don’t apply to them because they “did not consent” to those laws being enforced.
I bring this up just to give you some idea as to the power and influence social media can have on its users–especially those who spend hours a day on those sites. I’m lucky. Given what I do for a living, I know the “reality” of what’s going on outside of what I’m shown on my phone or screen. But not everyone is paid to pay close attention to the real world. For the “chronically on-line”, those 25-second video clips color their perception of everything.
A very common technique of these clickbait trolls is to take the same video and “localize” it. One person might see a street takeover video with a tag claiming it happened last night in Milwaukee. Another person will see the same video with Chicago identified as the location, or St Louis, or Minneapolis, or Detroit. The smash and grab video can be shared endlessly as happening at the Mall of America, or the Fox River Mall, or somewhere on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. That angry woman whose FoodShares card was declined? That was most likely shot years ago, and probably was a scammer trying to intimidate or distract a clerk while another crime is taking place somewhere else in the store–not in the past couple of weeks during the government shutdown. The thing is no one really knows.
But seeing these images over and over and over again leads you to believe things like “crime is out of control in our cities”, or “downtown (insert city name here) is a hellhole and we need to send in the troops to clean it up because the local police aren’t being allowed to”, or “billions of dollars are being lost to welfare fraud”. And it’s not just Trumpian talking points that are amplified and distorted in the social media sphere. You can find plenty of videos purporting to be of victims in Gaza being tortured, or of polar bears “being forced to swim for miles to find food because there is no more polar ice cap”, or cops “violating the rights of innocent people of color in (insert city name here)”.
And now, and even more insidious form of on-line disinformation and distortion is infiltrating our feed. It’s amazing how much New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdami has had to say in the week since his election victory. Facebook has suggested I check out videos where he is announcing that Sharia Law will now be recognized in the Big Apple, that white landlords will be targeted with measures forcing them to give up their properties, and showing him celebrating Hamas’ attack on Israel with other “Muslim-looking” people on the streets of New York.
The only problem is, that when those videos were “shot” and posted, Mamdami was in Puerto Rico with other New York Democrats plotting their next steps in running both the city and the state into the ground. All of those posted videos were created with artificial intelligence. And let me tell you, as someone who works with video content, it is very difficult to tell that they are fake. Subtle mouth movements don’t match up, and oftentimes, the speaker never blinks–but to an untrained eye, those seem like perfectly legitimate videos of someone they likely already hate proving to be the “traitor” they expect him to be.
In a way, this has become a new obsession for me on-line: spot the clues that the video is fake. In some of the most-recent porch pirate videos recommended for me, the stealer somehow manages to run from the house without actually setting foot on any of the steps. There are camera angles on some “hidden camera” shots that could only have come from a crane-mounted camera or one that was set up inside the vehicle of the porch pirate themselves to capture the glitter bomb in the package exploding all over them.
As we are reminded all the time, AI is “getting better” with every generation. It will learn to recognize its own small mistakes and correct them before any humans can see them. It will be incentivized to not just scour the rest of the internet to find the content that will keep you on the social media platform of its choice even longer, it will create its own media that it knows you will want to see. And that would be fine if it was kitten videos, or babies that hit 300-yard golf drives. But when that AI content can easily pass for “real news”–and is created in such a way to cause the most extreme emotional reaction in its viewer, it becomes a dangerous weapon available to anyone looking to sow discontent among the populace.
In the meantime, I’m doing my best to “cleanse” my timelines and feeds by returning to Jim Gaffigan poking fun at himself for being incredibly pale, and of Frank Costanza telling the moving and emotional story of how Festivus was created.
