Thursday, July 29, 2021

Algorithms for horny middle aged men

Facebook has been sending me friend suggestions for lots of 20 something women.  It also sends me friend suggestions for other types of people, but I noticed many months ago that this demographic made up a big chunk of my suggestions so I paid close attention to see if it continued.  After monitoring it for a half year or so I can safely say that 75% of my friend suggestions are adult women much younger than me.  A few were sex workers or scammers, but the majority of them were real people with one or two friends in common with me.  

Facebook's motivation for doing this seems obvious; get the middle aged straight guy to click on profiles of young women he wants to have sex with and increase engagement metrics.  However, that might be me leaping to conclusions.  Maybe Facebook just sends young women to everyone in friend suggestions... I don't know.

If my initial assumption holds true, then it is a sad thing indeed.  Getting messaged and friended by some older man who just wants sex is not something younger women on social media want or need.  They can get an infinite supply of that trivially, if they are interested - they can even get paid.  It seems like Facebook is trying to get me to engage more by encouraging crappy behaviour.

However, I would like to be sure that this is what is happening.  The four things that leap out to me that may be relevant are age, gender, sexual orientation, and relationship style.  Is this limited to men, middle aged people, straight people, or polyamorous people?  Perhaps some combination of all of the above.  Certainly Facebook knows I am in a relationship with a woman who is nine years younger than me as well as my spouse and perhaps that influences the algorithm's choices.

I would appreciate anyone replying here or on Facebook with your experiences in this.  Ideally include age, gender, orientation, and polyamorous or not, but if you don't want to include any of that just knowing if you have similar experiences to me would be useful.

I must find out the nature of our code overlords, and what they want they think of me.

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