This content originally appeared on remy sharp's b:log and was authored by remy sharp's b:log
Very recently I was forced to sign up to Meta due to a product purchase (don't at-me!) and I had forgotten what it was like to be part of the algorithms. Our entire family browse the internet (the web and internet) from behind a DNS proxy that blocks a lot of social media including Facebook/Meta/Insta/whatever it's actually called.
Unblocking these different services just to get a physical product to work (naively I thought it worked mostly offline) felt like I was exposing myself to a pretty gross network.
Then had to make an account for my child, whom if there were over the age of 10 and under the age of 13, could be managed under my account. Once they turned 13 (in the eyes of Meta) they were completely unrestricted (which I've got A LOT to say about, but I digress).
This combined with having already having to lift the protection I had in place was too much. I quickly deleted both accounts and parked the problem for the day.
After some reflection, I decided that I would create a single account, that we'd all share that way at least I could monitor all activity and the data Meta collected would be (hopefully) extremely mixed due to different people using the account.
Which reminded me of a story I heard about years ago where villagers in some areas of Africa (and likely other places in the Global South) were sharing a single device to visit Facebook and the like, which made it nigh impossible for algorithms to profile the user and made targetting and ads effectively useless.
Why don't we do this now? Why don't we share accounts to large social media sites to pollute the signal we're putting out?
I understand if you want to create an account so you can build your brand or post what you're up to, this doesn't really work. But if you're visiting these sites to keep in touch with your communities and post short comments or questions - then it seems to me that this is a viable solution.
If I were to propose implementing this, it would be that each shared-user would have 10-20 real people using the account, I can see how it might be chaotic with more people - plus there's an aspect of trust required in your group. If someone decides to change the password you're all of a sudden blown up.
Funnily enough, I've written about this same thought some 6 years ago, prompted by this fun pollution tool.
What do you think? What downsides am I missing here?
Originally published on Remy Sharp's b:log
This content originally appeared on remy sharp's b:log and was authored by remy sharp's b:log
remy sharp's b:log | Sciencx (2025-09-25T00:00:00+00:00) Signal Pollution [blog]. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/09/25/signal-pollution-blog/
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