Use Facebook’s fancy new algorithm to torture your friends

Anyone who regularly engages on social media (i.e. almost everybody) knows that algorithms have an inordinate amount of control over their emotional well-being. These heavily shrouded systems of 1’s and 0’s can make you feel jealous of your best friend, dump you in a wasteland of targeted advertising, or, as a recent Splitsider article claimed, dismantle an entire industry. But now, as Buzzfeed reports, Facebook’s newly revamped algorithm can also be weaponized in order to torture your friends and loved ones with inane pieces of content.

Nearly two weeks after posting an innocuous but completely unenjoyable video to her Facebook wall, Buzzfeed writer Katie Notopoulos realized she’d inadvertently gamed the new system. “The more people commented, the more the video showed up on other people’s feeds,” she writes, describing how her friends went from commenting that her post was simply lame to begging her to stop it from haunting their every waking moment. “As the rage around this post intensified, so did the comments… [it was] a vicious, algorithmically delicious cycle.”