Meta rediscovering the age-old adage that "sex sells". The core concept is little different than old car commercials featuring scantily clad women but with the plausible deniability of an algorithm so Meta can wash their hands of any negative consequences.

Can confirm. For as long as I've been on facebook (way over a decade now), I've only used it to share pics of my kids/pets to family/friends. I unfollow people who post political and other garbage content. And yet, my feed is nothing but ads and Reels of young women bouncing on trampolines in bikinis.

One thought I've had is that it has to do with your level of engangement. If like me you doesn't really use social media for more than a few minutes a day (in my case I count Snapchat and YouTube Shorts, because that's what I have), then you start seeing some a lot of boobs.

It seems like the algorithm panics, because you don't engange with anything much, or because your interests shifts to often and it can't deal with it. So it falls back to boobs.

There's also a sad trend of assuming that because you're into lifting, your also misogynistic. The more you engange with fitness content, even if it's training programs or how to correctly do certain exercises, platforms like YouTube will start flinging misogynistic content at you and it's incredibly hard to remove.

The issue is that they are very smart/subversive; they definitely track the amount of time you spend looking at certain pictures vs. others. So while you may be careful not to directly engage with certain material, if they noticed that you pause a little more at certain pics than others, and there is a pattern in the common topic in the pictures that you pause at, they use that information to create your interest profile.

This is it - you’ve got to be deliberate in scrolling immediately past anything remotely thirst-trappy, otherwise the algorithm hyperfixates. And then overstay your welcome at the type of content you want to see.

In my experience, it has worked (my discover page is an amalgamation of classic Simpsons, Dropout.tv, and Whose Line Is It Anyway?, while my Reels feed is unhinged in the right way.) But also I’ve stopped using it because my brain was melting.

> The more you engange with fitness content, even if it's training programs or how to correctly do certain exercises, platforms like YouTube will start flinging misogynistic content at you and it's incredibly hard to remove.

That explains why out of no where I got reccomendations for some gender conflict greentext channel, I had just that week been looking for lifting techniques.

Yes, I get those as well. Happens everything I've been looking a lifting videos for a day or two. Give it a bit more time and you'll get videos of right wing women explaining why modern women can't get dates.

It is fairly concerning and there's not real good way of telling YouTube that you're not interested. The dislike button does little and blocking the channel is also pretty ineffective as there are a myriad of channels with the similar content which you'll just be served instead.

So I've actually had great results by hitting not interested on all such videos. Youtube is actually my favorite algo because barring unexpected pipelines like fitness to red pills my home feed is 90% things I consider worth watching, assuming infinite time of course.

TIL that the lowest common denominator for engagement on the Internet is boobs. Ha!

Anyway, I know exactly what you mean. I have certainly seen YouTube pigeonhole me into a demographic that I'm not even remotely part of. One day I watched some ham radio-related content and then a couple of rugged flashlight reviews and YT decided I was a tacticool doomsday prepper would NOT stop suggesting videos about conspiracy theorist podcasts and how to make guns at home.

I get similar ads in Youtube Shorts. It was appearing only when I was abroad, and I was curious to see what is triggering it, it was mostly: male, 18+, location in country X. Same happens now in a country where I live.

Most of the reported ads don't get taken down by Google, although they are very obviously AI porn ads.

ha.. I was about to type this exact paragraph. my instagram has no human connections, I only follow local business (food, bars, museums/gardens, non profits, etc) so I can be aware of specials & things. I have no followers. I don't really like anything but clearly engage with cooking stuff, funny animal videos, comedy in general. Multiple languages. lots of crossover.

Honestly it's a pretty great instagram experience.

And yes I'm a middle aged male so no matter what the smut comes back (at least I get it in multiple languages too?)

i rarely log into facebook too but i do use marketplace. I just pulled it up on my phone, the "reels" thing was all AI + thirst traps just like you described but the rest of my feed was pretty plain vanilla posts from friends/family i follow + some ads.

I just tried to repro this.

On my Facebook account, I scrolled through 30 posts without seeing anything thirsty. Mostly synthesizer stuff, stuff for my kids' schools, and a few posts from friends. It definitely knows I'm male because the ads are for men's apparel.

Instagram was the same.

I never ever watch reels or other short form video, so maybe that has something to do with it.

It's happens in the reels. I don't really see thirsty posts in my feed either, just people I follow for the most part.

Yet another reason to avoid attention-span-destroying short form video. :)

If you click Search in Instagram, what's it show you by default, before you enter a search term?

You didn’t try hard to repro it.

Facebook uses your likes / groups / searches to customize your feed. If are active and don’t delete your old content, you have already trained FB to avoid the thirst traps for your account.

The article author said he was off-site site for 8 years, so FB was offering him random high engagement content to stuff his feed so he didn’t reach the end.

he is replying to

> Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago.

if meta identifies him as guy and he don't get a thirst trap after a minute then it's totally not "almost exclusively thirst trap".

Though OC also said:

> Another point: I tried very hard to fix this at one point. I went through instagram and hit like on nothing but pottery and parenting videos. For about a week I had a feed that looked like my wife's -- pottery and parenting. And then it reverted.

So I guess it depends how active you are? My speculation would be (that would match the article) - if facebook figures out you’re a man, but you don’t actively like and engage with specific topics - it will default to AI thirst trap slop.

No, if he's been looking at material that indicates an interest in thirst trap stuff for years, then looks at pottery for a couple of weeks, the algorithm correctly identifies that he isn't really into pottery and corrects back.

Yep. It's far from "it knows you're male => it gives you thirst traps non stop"

But also I will say that curating algo feed to show what you want is annoying and ultra frustrating, whenever it goes off the rails it makes me want to quit.

> he's been looking at material that indicates an interest in thirst trap stuff for years

N is obviously too small to get anything meaningful, though article was about the same problem and article’s author haven’t visited facebook for 8 years…

Cannot say about FB or IG, but on Youtube I get way too many “AI girlfriend” ads or video recommendations. I report as many as I can and my subscription channels are as far away from such topics as it can be. Thus I totally understand OC and article’s author.

Except that I am into pottery, and I'm a parent into parenting stuff. But instead of just liking the stuff it was showing me, I made the extra effort to seek out that content and like more of it in an attempt to train the algo.

Also, as I mentioned elsewhere, this problem only started about two years ago, and I've had instagram for 15 years. So either they did something differently, or suddenly there was a lot more of that content, but I didn't change my habits.

Also, as a funny side note, scrolling my feed this morning was suddenly thirst-trap free for the first time in years.

I don't have an Instagram, so maybe they did change their algorithm recently. However, remember that the whole concept of "training the algorithm" and "not wanting to mess up your algorithm" has been a common saying for years at this point. Unfortunately, this is against what the social media companies actually want, which is more engagement. So they start to look at other factors that are more difficult to game. For instance, it may have noticed that you linger at images of thirst traps more than other images it shows. In fact, it may notice that while you are purposely liking pictures of pottery and parenting, the actual pictures that you are liking have both thirst trap qualities and pottery/parenting qualities. Not accusing you of anything, just saying that that is the pattern they use because they know that overtly liking thirst trap pictures may be frowned upon.

I have scrubbed my account completely clean years ago and never use it for anything. When I log in once a quarter or so, just to check if someone sent me a message via the Messenger, all I see is soft-porn on my timeline.

I created a Facebook account a few years ago to get in on the local marketplace deals. After opening the website a few times and seeing very suggestive content, I had the idea of tailoring my feed to the most racy things I could find. Eventually, my feed was filled images of children wearing bathing suits and in suggestive positions, censored images of sexual acts, and AI generated images of elderly women with large breasts and little clothing. I was taking screenshots for a while but one time I opened my photo gallery while on the train and realized how embarrassing it looked to have a phone filled with this crap. Edit: Used more respectful language

Yeah you should probably delete those photos. Nobody is going to believe your story (myself included).

The part of the story I believe is the part about basically half naked children on Facebook, whether real or AI. I haven't put anything on my profile for the algorithm to tailor content to, since it's used for only marketplace and I've seen some very disturbing content that looked like it slithered off of X. It was as suggestive and inappropriate as you could be about kids, without being full-on porn. And Facebook/Meta seem to have no problem with it. It's a trash heap of a site and everyone involved with it working at Meta should be ashamed.

> my feed was filled images of children wearing bathing suits and in suggestive positions

> I was taking screenshots for a while

More than a little surprised this seemed like a good idea at the time, let alone that you did so for a while without thinking "There is no scenario this ends well"

It does sound bad, and yes I deleted them. I wanted to convince my friends at Meta of what I was seeing. They didn't believe me until I showed them.

Totally random question: if you traveled outside of your county, would you be legally obligated to notify the sheriff department? Just a random thought. Not related to your scientific research.

Notify of what?

Meanwhile, the algorithm is noticing you paused there, “This guy can’t get enough of this stuff!”.

I don't get anything like that. Just memes and people complaining about dog poo

Are you looking at your feed or the reels? It happens in the reels (and on Instagram if you go the search page, most of the suggested items are thirsty)

That may apply to a vanilla account, but if your account is old, then that's just the kind of stuff you click like on, dwell on, bookmark, etc. We have to consider that these men may not be honest about their activity as well.

The search and reels page just shows you what you interact with, and in my experience it tends to overreact to recent input. Look at a couple cat reels for example, and the very next or so refresh will have more cat reels.

My Facebook account is 21 years old and my Instagram is probably 15 years old.

This problem only started about two years ago. I didn’t change my behavior.

The feed. I almost never look at reels.

it's unfortunately not just your algorithm, but the views and likes of people who match your demographic specs....

Have you tried clicking "Show me less like this" on those thirst trap posts?

yes i deleted facebook eventually because they would not stop showing me this stuff despite clicking “show me less” many times

Many many times. It works for about an hour. I gave up. I've been on the internet long enough to have a pretty strong mental ad blocker. :)

Are we using 2 different versions of Facebook? I get nothing except content from my friends. None of it is AI generated. I just logged in because the article was a bit disturbing. The only AI content I found was the small amount a couple of my friends generated, and it was clearly marked as such.

Based on the upvotes my comment got and the replies, it looks like most people get the experience in the article, and a lucky few don't. Looks like you're one of the lucky few!

I've been a male (it's in my profile!) for all 22 years (yikes) I've been using facebook. I don't get that stuff.

There is definitely more to this. I’ve been on Facebook since it opened up to the public, and they know for a fact that I am a guy.

I literally only use it to communicate with family. I logged in today on both desktop and iOS, and the only thing I saw were updates from friends/family that I personally know.The only AI things were from a nerdy friend that created/shared/disclosed of it being AI, the rest was real stuff that I already knew about.

If users are seeing this, it is more likely something to do with settings, Facebook not knowing anything about you, or some other mechanism.

I am absolutely not holding them blameless, I am saying: compare notes and identify the actual problem, because I know a lot of folks using Facebook, and from conversations I had in the past hour or two, none of them see any of that, so there is likely something else going on.

I think they definitely track how long you stay on something as you're scrolling. They show an attractive woman doing your hobby, then it just keeps going.

Yeah it's an optimized skinner box. Any reaction above baseline is sure to be registered and reinforced.

They aren't blameless, friends and family only should be the default even if you don't engage much. Why would they default it to a bunch of junk.

I commented on a relatives post about a giant zucchini, and started getting posts about zucchinis in my feed. A couple of years ago, Facebook noticed that I stopped scrolling for calvin and hobbes comics and started showing me a bunch of those for a while.

I finally got the deletion thing to not error out and am almost at the end of the 30 day deletion period.

Attractive women generally don’t create these problems.

Just a few minutes ago we were discussing bikini options for an upcoming stay in Rio. And how she needs new ones as the ones I found from my feed were getting old.

I guess one advantage I have is being a man and not male-identified. Maybe she has stereotyped me and is expecting me to act like a man.

> No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago.

This isn't my experience at all. I get "sexy girls" reels, but infrequently and that's it. No other "thirst traps" at all, most of my feed is relevant to my interests too. Been on fb for many years now.

I feel like for me (a man) algorithm is super sensitive to engagement. If I er I mean my friend would look at these thirst traps, I er I mean my friend would have feed 90% full of them. On the other hand if I watch anything else I get none, and instead it's 90% epoxy table making, home inspection fails, rats solving puzzles, climbing videos or whatever it is I watched. Seems like mixing it up would be better, I can only watch so many rats solving puzzles.

I was able to tame it on Instagram by actively blocking 3-4 accounts every day and then engaging with accounts of just one topic; I picked Cricket. That said, I don't use the discovery section much so when I revisit after a few weeks it resets to filth. So the way it works is if I go to the discovery tab and like a couple of random cricket videos. It keeps it sane to an extent. Facebook is a different story though

I don’t understand. What you describe is foreign to me. My Instagram only has posts from people I follow, as well as generic ads like newspapers. I have not seen any of these thirst trap posts (not that I would find these posts appealing; they aren’t my type anyways).

> no matter what you do

I made them go down markedly by setting my age to be over 100. Doesn’t stop some of the thirst trap ‘reels’, but all the “Asian women would like to get to know middle aged guys like you!” bullshit went away.

I don't know, just an anecdote:

I populated my Instagram/FB Account with my interests (I mainly have the accounts to follow local racing leagues / marketplaces), and feeds are mostly cars and tech stuff, seldom do I see any thirst traps in it (including reels).

This is one of the reasons I always identify as non-binary when asked.

That is a pretty clever algorithm hack. I wonder if you get bombarded with pharmaceutical ads as a consequence.

I also put "non-binary" somewhere on Instagram, and almost every single ad is clothing related, mostly alternative fashion. I'm guessing that's partially aimed at my interests but I almost never buy clothes online, especially not from Instagram. Occasionally I see advertisements for surveys about LGBT people and also sometimes very rarely support sites on how to find queer-friendly therapists, and I bet I could find someone to prescribe something on such a site, but in total I've probably only seen 1-2 ads like that. Never direct pharmaceutical ads though, I do wonder what that would look like...

I also wanted to add a story about my fiancé's Instagram account feed, which degenerated into this sort of stuff out of nowhere one day. He has an account about art, he curated his feed, reels, explore tab so that he can see content by other people in his niche, I've seen it myself, all his reels were correctly related to what the account was about. Then one day, out of nowhere, all that disappeared. It's as if the algorithm completely reset, and reverted this account to a completely blank slate, around 1-2 years back. To this day if you look at his explore tab, it's about 75% thirst traps (and I doubt this is the kind he'd be interested in), alongside some extremely broad reaching content, some soccer memes in foreign languages, some "skits", if you can call them that, and extremely bad generic "memes". I saw it happen in front of me, he did not engage with anything like that, he's also not really the type to click on random thirst traps and he has no trouble spotting the usual AI slop. It happened from one hour to another, in an instant. He's still mad about it.

I block pretty much all ads, but that's an interesting question.

I don't like anything even slightly thirst trappy, and my fyp is clean.

Facebook changes to be more like TikTok. Content to generate addiction so they can sell more adds.

> But it would be good for more people to learn about this so they don't get angry when they see their male-identified partners/friends feeds.

You seem to be assuming that none of them fall for the thirst traps. The reason thirst traps exist is because they work a good percentage of the time.

And despite your confident statement that “it doesn’t bother me anymore”, you only become “banner blind” to some content. The more authentic the content appears or the closer the topic is to something you are interested in, the more likely you are to engage with it.

I try to avoid BookFace with a passion, but I struggle with these issues on YouTube. My solution is to never browse YouTube while logged in, always use Incognito Mode, depend on browser bookmarks (instead of like/subscribe), and to close the browser as soon as I realize The Algo is pushing content I don’t care for.

Just click search on Instagram and BAM, thirst trap central. Don't have to have ever interacted with ANY of them, liked any of them, or follow anything CLOSE to that content, it's coming for you if you're a male between the ages of 18-99 that, presumably, the algo thinks is straight-leaning.

My _feed_ on Instagram is a bit more curated and sticks closer to that curation: weird music stuff, weird instrument stuff, and because I show my daughter a lot of it, Broadway musical stuff/BTS content/other actually interesting/cool stuff. So generally speaking my IG feed is curated and good. My FB feed is still trash; it feels like it casts a much wider net, but I've also been proactively following accounts that interest me on IG and don't do that much at all on FB (except some stand up comedians, since the format is actually really good for casual bite-sized scrolling).

But IG search... woooooo boy, it's _wild_. I have to hide my phone away from my daughter when I'm trying to pull up a specific account because the search interface is completely bikini-clad crazy thirst content. And again, I've literally never engaged or interacted or even really _lingered_ on any of those posts. It just goes for it.

One of the creepiest aspects of this is that the 'thirsty content' is mainly mainly AI-generated pictures by spammers who know what they are doing, but also includes 'correlated' posts by normal users.

Eg you have a 15-year-old daughter and post a picture of her smiling in school uniform on Instagram because it's her birthday or something. The algorithm takes that post and shows it to randomly selected men who often interact with pictures of attractive female teenagers, even though none of your other posts get shared like this outside of your connections.

> The algorithm takes that post and shows it to randomly selected men who often interact with pictures of attractive female teenagers, even though none of your other posts get shared like this outside of your connections.

What evidence suggests this?

I don't use any Meta services and I absolutely hate them and consider them evil. I know they do awful, terrible things and if someone has evidence of this I will believe it given Meta's track record. But this is far enough outside my current understanding of the awful things that they do, or people claim they do, that it needs a source.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/20/parents-o...

that is nothing compared to this: https://futurism.com/facebook-beauty-targeted-ads

Meta is beyond evil, like waaaaay beyond evil. In a normal society (that ship has said for us a while ago) the company would be shut down and everyone running it at the top level would be in prison for life

This is really false. I will join the chorus of others and say i don't get that stuff in my feeds. Although maybe meta doesn't identify me as guy

Also can confirm. From the first moment I started an IG account (at my wife's request), the default algorithm was to give me almost exclusively thirst trap posts with zero geographic or other relevance to me. I had to weed through thirst trap accounts that were brought up before hers - when searching by user name.

I took a few minutes a day to search for cat pictures and cooking videos, and sharing cat videos with my spouse (her reason for using IG). It was a fight, but after a few days the thirst trap suggestions immediately flipped to giving me stuff I can look at in public and not feel like a massive creep. There was a long tail, with occasional "....are you sure?" suggestions, but at this point a couple years of carefully reinforcing the same stuff seems to have overwhelmed the thirst trap suggestions.

The sole reason for not using those sites is the whole knowledge that you have to do this crap.

Yea I wonder why people are willing to jump through such hoops, but to each their own I guess

I use it maybe twice a week. My wife maybe every day or two, and will go through things if they make her laugh. Apparently she never got thirst trap hunky dudes non-stop when she first signed up.

I don't have them... :/

I just tried this: browse YouTube with incognito and watching 3 engineering vids only (Veritasium, Real Engineering, and Practical Engineering).

The home page shorts are about 50% thirst traps. There is creepy stuff, click-bait, and American politics/news (for and against Trump).

The worst one is a short "this is why ram costs $900" by "discord memes" showing a young girl with revealing clothing. Almost 1 million views.

I closed my YouTube account years ago because it was just pissing me off.

I feel this issue has started to slowly become worse and worse as we've been able to build better "preference profiles" based on small amounts of data. I notice it often when watching a single YouTube video in incognito mode, the sidebar is usually full of fairly racist Australian content (I am Australian). This is something I would never normally see, and not something that's likely coming from whatever video I've decided to watch in incognito. It's likely just assuming based on what's a common trend in my location.

If an algorithm knows you well, it's usually pretty okay, but until that point you're being bombarded with lowest common denominator content based on your demographic. Shorts seems to be even worse; mine is mostly science facts and comedy skits, I didn't understand the "brainrot" descriptions until I looked at a few in incognito mode.

> No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago.

Bullshit. This happens because you engaged. I never engaged with it in the slightest and it disappeared. I mostly just get snakes and local stuff now.

I can second this. The app basically shows more of what is proven to keep you in the app. It's kinda revealing to be frank: instead of getting mad with it just do some introspection.

> Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do.

What if you're gay though. They have to be able to detect that somehow too

Probably still a relatively small percentage of the total for them to care.

My understanding is that it's likely somewhere around 7.5% for men and women. Including bisexual people brings it closer to 10%. That's based on self-reporting, I think. I'm not sure how significant that would be in Meta's world.

Among men this would only be 3 or 4%. Probably not that significant given how coarse the strategy itself is.

Then they'd undoubtedly show you hot guys. I don't know why this wouldn't be the obvious answer.

Algorithm has discovered dudes like boobs.

More news at ten.

I have the same thing on YouTube. I usually use adblock but I used youtube without adblock recently and was startled by the ads. It's either "AI girlfriend", or video games, or video games about AI girlfriends. (I don't play video games, and I'm not interested in AI girlfriend. At least Meta shows me ads about stuff I actually find interesting!)

But my experience is constantly interrupted by images of scantily clad AI generated women. I'm no prude but it seems more than a little inappropriate to me.

Oh yeah and the other 10% of the ads are about exploding children.

I think I am going to install Adblock again...

This is why I gave up on social media

> Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do.

I don't know what I did, but this has not been true of my account. A few years ago I did notice a sharp increase of AI slop filled with comments thinking it was real, which I found hilarious, but it wasn't thirst traps. It was more like "this person has a hidden talent and they are sad because they aren't recognized. Show them some love." And the person is obviously fake. I saw the same fake AI people in multiple languages.

Anyway, after a while that stuff lessened a lot, and the feed is a bit more reasonable. Mainly I get stuff that was posted on TikTok a few months ago. Lately there are a lot of quotations from the Epstein files.

Is it because "Meta identifies you as a male" or because men look longer at sexy pictures of women? I assume Meta has some heuristic to determine how long you look at items in their feed even if you don't click anything.

Facebook knows I'm male, and I see things like this very rarely -- on the order of one or two a month. Maybe that's FB ('s algorithm) testing my "defenses": they/it show me something like that as an experiment, and if I ever clicked on it, the floodgates would open.

But I don't, so it doesn't. Or maybe FB knows I'm happily married and that won't work on me in the first place.

Or maybe FB knows I'm a sucker for chess and go puzzles, so they're my equivalent of this?

They might have multiple types of men because it only shows me all kind of outdoor activities + construction tips

Interestingly enough when you tell Facebook you’re not interested in a post you can answer why: doesn’t match interests, spam, sexual, insult, don’t like creator. One of those isn’t like the other.

There’s a couple other pseudo-erudite slop holes you can fall into. One is scientific breakthroughs, one is psychedelic philosophical ramblings, and one is historical summarizations. They all kind of fall into a Ripley’s Believe it or Not style of trying to be mind blowing.

If you say not interested to every suggested post of something you don’t follow, it’ll try a couple topics and then revert for a bit to exclusively things you do follow.

Mine started as women with ample posteriors at hockey games but quickly switched to police arguing with people and really sick ski and snowboarding videos. The police stuff is trailing off.

I do ski patrol, guess it thought, a ski cop, I liked cops and skiing. Oh I was also getting a lot of ai generated bane videos. Felt sorry for that guy, judge was real inhumane to him.

I don't. Instead Facebook tries to shove right-wing crap down my throat. I'd rather see the thirst trap posts, to be honest.

Snapchat, on the other hand, I had to uninstall because the stuff they tried to make me view was completely and utterly disgusting (think pimple-popping vids and worse). There was only one person left that I communicated with through their app, so it wasn't a real loss for me.

The part I really agree with is the social impact