Porn and disturbing clickbait in Facebook stories
Porn and disturbing clickbait in Facebook stories
Hi,
My elderly mom really enjoys browsing Facebook on her Android phone, scrolling through posts about adorable animals and interesting stories or photos. Recently, the "Story" section at the top of her feed has been completely filled with explicit images, disturbing content (like plastic surgery gone wrong), and sensational headlines such as "Joe Biden gets Stabbed!". I’m not very active on Facebook, so I’m unsure how this is supposed to work. In my feed, the Stories appear to come from my Facebook friends.
I checked her settings, and her Story feed is set to private/Friends, but there aren’t any of her stories visible. It’s odd that the accounts posting these kinds of images are named things like "Animals Story," "Dogs make us happy," or "Cats are cute." This makes me suspect she might have liked a cute animal photo in her feed, which somehow became a trigger for spam.
I looked at her Friends and Groups list—nothing suspicious found. I went to the menu, Settings, News feed, and unfollowed to see which pages she follows. There are several similar-sounding pages listed (like "Whisker World"), but none match the stories she’s sharing. When I opened "Whisker World," it displayed cat pictures instead.
The only solution I found is to manually mute or unfollow each story, which would take a long time because there are thousands of them and doesn’t solve the root problem.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
-jp
I think it would be best to take a more extreme approach and stop following everyone. Then gradually bring back a few chosen family members and friends as needed.
It seems Facebook permits around 200 unfollows at once. After waiting a short time, you can unfollow another 200. This process repeats.
There are numerous resources about this topic. For instance:
https://circleboom.com/blog/unfollow-all...-facebook/
You can easily discover similar articles.
But unless someone close to me can stop liking and persuade them not to like, there might be limited options. The only alternatives are checking more often and removing unwanted followers each time.
Finally – although I question the effectiveness – reaching out to Facebook directly could help.
Hackers don’t care much, and if the platform doesn’t take real action, little can be done.
I already have friends and family moving away from Facebook for various reasons. To be honest, I’m getting close to being able to do without it myself.
Too many emails about a relative or friend posting, then Facebook shows me unrelated content instead of just the post.
It’s like being served food you don’t want versus what you actually ordered – or worse, being forced to eat something completely different.
Without any clicks, these companies won’t last.