The newest AI slop on Facebook exploits suburban fear
+ Clout chasing the Costcoverse, a stan account correction, Australian murder chickens, and the true story behind an iconic Vine
Thousands of people on Facebook are melting down over an AI generated hoax claiming that neighbors are egging each other's cars over Halloween decorations.
"MY NEIGHBOR THREW EGGS AT MY CAR BECAUSE IT 'BLOCKED THE VIEW' OF HIS HALLOWEEN DECORATIONS," a post shared to a page called Movie Character with 257,000 followers posted.
The exact same car egging copypasta has been posted by hundreds (if not thousands) of Facebook pages reaching millions of collective followers with names like USA Story, Volleyball Women, Top Trends, Love Style, and US Democracy. The posts nearly all include links to scammy SEO websites in the comments boosting to articles about the car egging, likely to generate money from the display ads served on the page.
The story is written from the point of view of a single mom with newborn twins who had her car smeared in eggs by her neighbor after she blocked his Halloween decor. The end of the post talks about taking revenge and is accompanied by an AI generated image of a car covered in eggs.
The comments are a predictable mix of thousands of older people reacting in horror while thousands of slightly more digitally savvy people comment trying to explain to them that it's all AI.
"There are hungry people in this country who would have been happy to eat all of those eggs! It makes me sick how wasteful that is!," one woman commented.
"Call a cop, that's destruction of private property. And what hospital is he in so we can send flowers," another posted.
The car egging hoax is just the latest trend in AI slop on Facebook, which has become absolutely overrun with digitally created images meant to generate engagement. At first, much of the AI generated content was bizarre, surreal images like shrimp jesus. Then, it evolved into aspirational fantasy landscapes and homes and sympathy-bait stories of impoverished children and veterans.
Now, the AI generated bait seems to be boosting a Halloween-related moral panic aimed at scaring suburban Facebook users.
"These posts are designed specifically to be bait around Mischief Night," (the night before Halloween when young people get into mischief like toilet papering houses or smashing pumpkins), said Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor at CUNY Queens College who teaches media studies.
Moral panic hoaxes have always been rampant during Halloween. Decades ago it was local media that whipped parents into a frenzy over baseless fears about things like razor blades and drugs in candy, or kids pulling stunts. On Facebook, however, these types of hoaxes can bypass the media and reach tens of millions directly. This scale coupled with AI generated images lend credibility to the hoax in the minds of many viewers.
Cohen said that what concerned him about the car egging bait is that, unlike the generic AI slop before it, this one seemed to be inciting fear and distrust in people about their neighbors.
"There is this thread of anger that is going on as we're getting closer to the election," he said. "[It makes you wonder], what is your neighbor doing? It's the perfect bait because it has two things at once: those damn kids, plus anger or vitriol towards your neighbor."
As Facebook becomes more and more overwhelmed by AI generated garbage, the content and stories told alongside it will likely become more extreme. The car egging thing is a good example of a story that seems relatively harmless, but sows outrage and promotes the hoax that these sorts of egg attacks are becoming more common.
“[The AI imagery] on Facebook is going down this evolutionary track from very basic range bait to visuals of car damage,” Cohen said. If Meta can’t figure out how to mitigate the spread of this sort of garbage, “the next trend,” he said, “is going to be stranger and more violent.”
Late night TV is clout chasing the Costcoverse (A.J., Big Justice, and The Rizzler went on Fallon)
TikTok’s favorite father-son duo, A.J. Befumo and Big Justice, alongside their friend and fellow TikTok star, an 8 year old who goes by the The Rizzler because of his signature rizz face, were guests on Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon last night.
You can watch The Rizzler teach Fallon how to do the Rizz face here. I shot an advertisement with The Rizzler a couple weeks ago and wrote about the experience:
The AJ and his son are known online as the Costco Guys and the group also taught Fallon how to rate Costco’s double chunk chocolate cookie using their famous “boom meter,” where they give each food item a 1-5 rating of boom or doom.
If none of these words make any sense to you, or like me, you’ve become darkly obsessed with the whole Costcoverse, I interviewed A.J. Befumo on my podcast Power User last week. Take a listen.
The true story behind the ‘and they were roomates’ Vine
On October 25, 2014, Vine user mattsukkar uploaded a Vine to the platform showing a woman walking down the sidewalk having a conversation via her headphones. As she passes, she remarks, “and they were roommates!” Flipping the camera back around to himself, mattsukkar says to the camera aghast, “Oh my god, they were roommates.”
The Vine was looped nearly 70 million times and YouTube reuploads have amassed tens of millions of views. The clip was posted again to Twitter last week on its 10th anniversary when one woman quote tweeted the video and commented, “If this came out today people would find the woman in the video an harrass her to find out who the 'roommates' were+ the story behind it. shed probably be invited on talk tuah podcast or stn.”
It turns out the woman in the video actually did come forward via her coworker on TikTok to share the backstory. Apparently the TikTok was posted in 2022 but it really popped off this week.
The comment “and they were roommates” was apparently related to a discussion the woman was having with a friend, describing how another friend of hers from college and that girl’s roommate decided to create a business together. It turned out the roommate was potentially committing fraud. When she was called out, the roommate fled the country. And they were roommates! Now you know.
What I’m reading
‘Fandom has toxified the world’: Watchmen author Alan Moore on superheroes, Comicsgate and Trump
Enthusiasm can be a productive force for good, but our culture has rapidly become a fan-based landscape that the rest of us are merely living in. - The Guardian
The Agony and Ecstasy of the Timothée Chalamet Lookalike Contest
“It almost turned into a full-on cop-versus-twink extravaganza.” And then the real Timmy showed up. - GQ
AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
WIRED asked an AI detection startup to analyze Medium. It took a sampling of 274,466 posts over a 6-week period and estimated that over 47% were likely AI-generated. CEO Tony Stubblebine then said it “doesn’t matter” as long as nobody reads it. - WIRED
Would You Pay Someone to Teach You How to Be an Influencer?
Valeria Lipovetsky brings in millions of dollars as an online personality. Now she’s teaching aspirants what she’s learned — for a price. - NYT
The Most Opinionated Man in America
Mike Solana, a Peter Thiel protégé, has made his Pirate Wires newsletter a must-read among the far right, anti-woke investor class—and a window into what the most powerful people in tech really think. - The Atlantic
How social media video clippers have become some of the most powerful outlets of the 2024 campaign
The Harris and Trump campaigns both have teams of clippers. So do outside political groups like American Bridge 21st Century, a liberal super PAC. But the most impactful ones are people who work from home on their own, shaping the news cycle one snappy clip at a time. - CNN
More fun stuff
There are 12 million full-time content creators in the U.S. and at least 27 million part time influencers according to a report from the Keller Advisory Group, a marketing and social media analytics company.
The report found that 6% of Americans between the ages of 16 to 54 are full-time content creators, earning an average of $179k per year.
PDF To Brainrot transforms boring PDFs into TikTok-style 'brainrot' content.
Saddam Hussein’s hiding spot if he served.
Netflix finally added a feature that lets you share clips to social media.
A Twitter thread detailing everything that happened at the Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest’.
There’s a restaurant in Beacon, NY that’s very popular and on all the best-of lists, and the owner replies to every negative review with a very intense and carefully crafted personal insult.
You are not prepared for this Dwyane Wade statue reveal.
Instagram reduces video quality for posts that aren’t raking in views.
Armie Hammer is trying to make a comeback with a new podcast.
The Harris campaign's Fortnite map is basically just a city covered in Harris signs.
Midcentry modern dream home of the day (it could use some fixing up but it has great bones!).
The 2024 Forbes Top Creator list includes 50 influencers who earned a collective $720 million over the last 12 months.
This woman had an insanely close encounter with a Cassowaries, Australia’s “murder chicken” with six inch long claws that can “shred human flesh like butter” and is the closest living descendant of Velociraptor.
This clip is the perfect time capsule of culture in the 00s.
We’re forcing stan accounts to issue corrections now.
It’s time to ban the word Rizz.
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After 20 something years of social media it feels like we are just going through the same cycles over and over. The specifics change but the behavior is the same. None of this has improved anything. Before the eggs there were those annoying email forwards your parents would send you. Same thing with Costco content and the people who make consumerism their personality, that's almost a vaudeville act at this point. It's almost worse now because we have better methods of quantifying exactly how useless most of this is becoming. It's really affecting me lately. I no longer care at all what happens to society and at least once a day I question if I'm losing the will to live (so far I don't think so). I think AI slop has the possibility to be funny, but very few people see it that way. Almost anything you post with AI you get trolled now by comments about how AI is ruining the world, but that's not true. People have ruined the world, AI just helped them do it more efficiently.
I doubt very much that the Cassowary is in any way related to a Velociraptor.