Block all the originators of them. I've been doing that for a week or so now, and facebook is slowly getting better. (first I left all groups myself - facebook is a terrible way to keep up with you hobbies as there is no good way to see everything). Facebook is becoming more and more pictures of real events in my friend's life - actually social media, and less and less politics, memes, and pictures that were funny the first time 10 years ago...

I'm skeptical of claims that just blocking or unfollowing the right accounts is the solution to the problems od social media. I'm skeptical of the claim even as an individual, but at scale, it's nonsense. Facebook has world class engineers and scientists optimizing their platform to manipulate the masses and increase engagement. It's their entire business model. Telling people to "just block" accounts they don't want to see will never overcome that.

You are right to be skeptical. I spend a lot of time blocking all the garbage people are sharing on Facebook. Things have gotten a lot better since I started, but it is far too much effort. Some of my friends spend way too much time looking for things to share instead of sharing pictures of their kids, looking at pictures of my kids and then going on to live a life. These are real friends that I do want to track so I can't block them.

Slowly facebook is learning that it needs to show me pictures of my friend's kids - even friends are rarely interact with though. Mostly because I've blocked everything else the algorithm might show me.

> Slowly facebook is learning that it needs to show me pictures of my friend's kids

You seem to be misunderstanding Facebook's goals. They don't care about showing you pictures of your friend's kids. They are using your friend's content to dangle a carrot in front of you to keep you clicking on what they want you to click on. If you've stopped clicking on ads and promoted posts, it's because they haven't yet learned what they need to show to you keep you clicking, but they will! They're dedicating all of their engineering efforts to keep people clicking.

I'm working on this with a browser extension. It's very early still and mostly focused on reddit, but I have plans to use machine learning/NLP to make it a bit smarter and for it to roll out for use on Facebook too.

http://healthy.surf

It's a really interesting question. What makes people so eager to respond? I keep seeing friends and family (especially family, older generation) answering these obvious spam questions all the time.

My guess: they're lonely and bored at home, and starved for conversation.

Well you can take the approach that one TikToker’s mom took: comment on the post and say it’s datamining.

I once saw an official Facebook blog post about some change to the T&C, with 80,000+ comments on it, most of them one of those meaningless copy-pastes about how they don't consent to Facebook using their data. More comments were appearing every second.

Every 20th post or so, someone would be saying something like "Stop it you idiots, this stupid copy-paste doesn't do anything, you can't declare your rights like this." Then a bunch more copy-paste comments would appear before the next person telling the idiots to stop.

Would the segment of users who respond to content-free posts like these have much of a reaction to a comment saying that?

I don't mean that as a snarky dismissal, but a sincere question. I know that plenty of people, especially among digital-natives, have instant negative reactions to being reminded of data collection. But the type of user answering "what was your first car" or "what do you call your grandchildren" do not strike me as having much overlap with the groups that are cynical about social media platforms.

I don't really think it's a legitimate or scalable way to inform people. On a smaller scale it could help people in the local social network to be aware of what those posts are doing.

Another thing to do is to tell people "they're trying to use this information to get into your bank account". That will make them stop really fast. But as far as scalability goes, I don't think there's a way.

No individual can.

If we all agree (and I mean, a large number of people) to fully quit Facebook; or at the very least - report and block every single one of these sites and postings, I think that would be a great deterrent.