“Facebook Poets Are Dumb as Fuck!”

Many of my Facebooks friends are brilliant writers.

Most of them are liberal or lean to the left.

When the news came out that Meta will no longer censor content for “wokeness” and will allow AI-generated nonhuman profiles, writers begin to get worried.

My friends are LGBTQIA, so knowing about Zuckerberg’s support for Trump and recently hearing him say on the Rogan podcast that he wants to put the “masculine energy” back into the company, Poets are talking about leaving the platform and joining others, such as Bluesky.

They talk about this ON Facebook.

Many of them suspect or accuse the tech bros who run Facebook of suppressing their voices by minimizing what we post, especially when it’s anti-Trump or fighting for progressive issues. They are the enemy!

But there is no conscious “they” thinking about progressive Facebook writers. There are only algorithms set to the profit-motive (expansion) in a complex system designed to hack your attention and keep you there. We are invisible as people and appear in the system as rivulets of information, zeros and ones that the dominate code processes and provide us with the well-known addictive qualities of social media.

The decision to allow fake news –even if racist and sexist -- will not affect us in the way we might think. We’re not going to suddenly be confronted with fake news that tries to get us to identify with racist and sexist posts or videos; nor will we even notice what misinformation we’re getting, because the misinformation on our feeds will reinforce OUR values.

We’re going to get content that stirs deep emotion. On our feed, we might get a story from the news --and it’ll look real—describing how Ice agents raided an elementary school in the Midwest and took away the children, arresting the teacher who stood at the door blocking the agents from getting in. The kids, who were not legally in the US, were taken to detention centers, and you know how brutal these places are for the kids. Even if this story is false, we will believe it, because physiologically, we cannot react any other way.

It activates our amygdala, the “fear center” of our brain, and we are flooded with cortisol and adrenalin, and the intensity of our feelings coupled with our memories override the logical part of our brains, and if the post looks like a real news source, maybe a CNN news logo is spread across the image, How could we NOT believe it?

We know there is the possibility that ICE will go after children, and we know it has happened in the past. Who cares if the news is fake? The reaction is real. Yet, If we use all that energy to show our rage about something that never happened, when it does happen our energy levels can be well spent. Not to mention how it chips away at our cognitive ability to discern between what is real and what is a lie.

I fear a future where children are being yanked like criminals out of the classroom, just because they’re brown, just because, like us, they have hard-working immigrant parents who would do anything to give them a decent life. I can’t help but think of the children’s detention center in Tornillo, outside of El Paso. I went to a protest there, and three buses one after another passed slowly us as they entered the gates, the kids inside trying to look at us, to be seeing by us, their faces pressed against the dark glass. It was heartbreaking, and there were legitimate reports of abuse those children suffered at those centers.

The Meta algorithms can send made up stories like this to addict us to the platform. The science is very clear: if there is a flood of cortisol and adrenaline, it’s going to cloud or override our reasoning, so even if the misinformation is blatantly wrong we are inclined to believe it.

The algorithms will also provide us with posts that will make us feel good, justified, like a recent image that went around with ICE agents arresting somebody who wore a Latinos for Trump T-shirt. Was it real? Seems fake, but it doesn't matter. It made people feel good. We like to say, I told you so! We are getting what we want to see.

Nobody is impeding our posts because they’re anti-Trump or anti-Meta. There is no homunculus inside the brain of Facebook, no little masculine man pressing buttons at the control center laughing out loud how and saying, “Poets are dumb as fuck!”

These non-conscious algorithms are created not to get us to believe in one thing over another, not to get us to support Trump, but to keep us addicted to the platform. And one of those ways to addict us is through anger and fear. We will click on something or linger longer if there is an intense release of anger. The algorithms process and store not only what we click on but our Dwell Time. As we scroll through the feeds, what we pause on is converted into code and it feeds us back similar images and stories to keep us pausing longer still.

We are not customers of Facebook. We are the product. To quote the great Pachuco poet, “Los they are us!”

What they care about is keeping us on the shelf, where we can be sold to their clients. They want us to be addicted.

Like any addiction, the end result will be the shrinking of our cognitive ability.

The basic chemistry behind harmful addiction is chemistry. We all know about the dopamine we get from social media. This is well known. I know writers who will post entire poems and anticipate the pleasure that will come from the reactions they’ll get. Some writers will write posts about what they want to write about, and in doing so reduce their enthusiasm and focus to actually do the writing. No judgement, I do this too!

The science tells us that when you post something about what you're going to write, and you get a large reaction from the community, comments such as, I can't wait to read it! the experience provides dopamine. It activates your pleasure center and you feel happy and motivated, until the dopamine wears off, and it impedes your motivation to actually do the work. You already got the attention, so what’s the point. I’m not saying poets think this way, but this is how our reward system functions to keep us flourishing. Our bodies and brains tell us it’s time to go on to something else, to seek another dopamine reward.

(It's 6 o'clock in the morning as I write this, and I need to wake my daughter for school, so more later. I want to highlight AI generated “friends” and fake accounts you can “follow.” I got to run!!)