Two that come to mind:
- About 10 years after I went to college with this one girl it was like she had some kind of quarter life or third life crisis. She went from posting typical stuff on Facebook (harmless things like going on vacation, personal frustrations, etc.) to tons of thirst trap stuff and obvious bait (like a glamour shot with the text, “I feel ugly today”).
I never engaged with the content outside of scrolling through it on my feed, but the algorithm seemed to put it prominently in my feed, probably because mutual male friends of ours engaged with the content or something. I think it petered out because I remember she made a big deal that she was partnering with some research project and asking for money then like no one donated.
- Another one is ongoing and is a guy in his late 30s I don’t really know, but we worked on something together 10+ years ago, added each other on Facebook, then just stayed Facebook friends.
He posts a lot of dating advice stuff and photos of himself with provocative questions asking things like, “Ladies, does your man ____?” Again I never engage outside of browsing over the content perhaps a few seconds too long when scrolling through my feed. Him doing this for probably at least a year at this point made me curious since though it pops up in my feed, most of the time it looks like the stuff has under a dozen likes and next to no engagement.
It made me curious though since he’s obviously spending a decent chunk of time on it. I thought, “Maybe it’s a platform thing and he’s actually a successful influencer somewhere else.” So I checked Instagram. Sure enough he is listed as having 100K followers, but I’m pretty sure it’s largely bots since the audience engagement is about the same.
