It’s tempting to immediately declare what you are about to read as the death knell for Facebook, but history suggests otherwise. Social media has a knack for reinvention. While some users will inevitably leave, others may stick around, whether out of habit, necessity, or curiosity.
My personal Facebook feed has become eerily depersonalised. Gone are the familiar updates from friends sharing their lives, no photos of Sarah’s puppy, no check-ins from Kirsty’s hiking trip, and no quirky musings from Angela about her latest baking experiment. Instead, my feed seemed overtaken by faceless posts, memes from pages I’d never followed, and advertisements thinly veiled as content. It felt less like catching up with a community and more like wandering through a ghost town with billboards. The uproar isn’t just about the bots; it’s about what they represent. Facebook, once a symbol of genuine connection, now feels like an increasingly alienated space. Yet this isn’t the first time social media users have faced a seismic shift. Platforms evolve or devolve and we adapt. Some changes we embrace; others drive us away.
The announcement that Meta plans to fill Facebook with AI-generated "users," virtual entities designed to drive engagement, landed like a lightning bolt on social media, sparking a firestorm of debates this week. Is this the desperate last breath of a dying platform, or just another evolution of how we connect online?
Meta's vision of these AI "characters" goes beyond the spammy bots we’ve grudgingly tolerated on platforms for years. These new AIs, we’re told, will have bios, profile pictures, and the ability to create content that mimics human interactions.
Meta is selling it as an innovation.
Critics like me, see something more insidious.
Facebook will become a platform where real users are increasingly outnumbered by artificial ones, turning Facebook into a simulation rather than a space for genuine connection. The implications are troubling. If advertisers pay for engagement metrics that include AI interactions, is this deception or just the next phase of the digital economy? For users, the concern is more personal. How will we navigate a space where it’s impossible to distinguish between humans and machines?
For many including me, the shift has already been felt. The updates from my friends, those little snippets of life that used to make Facebook feel warm and alive, are drowned out by noise. The feed is no longer a window into our communities but a curated funnel of irrelevant clutter. And now, with AI set to populate the platform further, will these dwindling human voices be silenced entirely?
Take Instagram’s shift to prioritise Reels over photos. Many users grumbled but stayed. Others migrated to alternatives. The question now is whether Facebook’s pivot toward AI will alienate its remaining loyalists or reshape their experience.
For me, the magic of Facebook left long ago. The platform once gave me a way to celebrate life’s little moments with the people I care about, especially when I am overseas, buried under layers of AI-generated noise. The question isn’t whether Facebook is dying. It’s whether it’s still a place where I want to be. So, is this the end of Facebook as we know it? Perhaps. But as with every shift online, it’s up to us to decide how or if we adapt.
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