Facebook "filtered messages": why did I get this?

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Lives in Adamstown, Pitcairn Islands

10/14/2014 11:32AM

I spoke to some doctors about stem cell therapy for schizophrenia as a cure. They said it might work cause the cells have the ability to transform and repair existing cells. Its not done publicly because many drug companies would loss billions and many doctors would loss their practices. Let the doctors explain it.

http://stemcellofamerica.com/
http://stemedix.com
www.stemcellrevolution.com
http://www.worldstemcellsclinic.com

10/15/2014 6:49PM

The truth is already out there. It has worked on rat brains. These are published articles of stem cell working for Schizophrenia:

www.news.wisc.edu/21698

www.theguardian.com/science/2010/may/27/bone-marrow-transplants-mental-illness

www.nature.com/mp/journal/v18/n11/full/mp2013111a.html

www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/004111.html

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130909152958.htm

uthscsa.edu/hscnews/singleformat2.asp?newID=4590

weill.cornell.edu/news/news/2014/05/brain-cell-transplants-reverse-psychosis-in-schizophrenic-mice-betsy-ross.html

timesofsandiego.com/tech/2014/09/11/ucsd-finds-chemical-cause-schizophrenia/

schizophrenia.com/?p=394

www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7450

www.jneurosci.org/content/34/29/9506.short

www.google.com/m?q=interneuron+stem+cell+therapy&client=ms-opera-mini&channel=new

www.google.com/m?q=neural+stem+cell+therapy&client=ms-opera-mini&channel=new

Hoax, hoax, HOAX!! Why people are still falling for internet deception

Don't fall for the hoax: Facebook isn't restricting your News Feed to 25 friends

Rob Price Business Insider
Aug. 11, 2018, 9:45 AM

lThere's a viral Facebook post making the rounds that claims the News Feed is restricting what you see to just 25 friends.

Spoiler alert: It's just not true.

No, Facebook is not restricting the content you see on your News Feed to just 25 or 26 friends.

Over the last few months, a hoax has been making the rounds on the social network. It claims, in essence, that Facebook has implemented an algorithm change that means you will only see posts from a select few of your friends. Anyone else is flat out of luck.

The hoax encourages users to combat this by copying and pasting a faux-informative message about the "change" — and then asking users' friends to reply to the post.

Here's one example Business Insider has seen (the wording often varies slightly):

Hello Friends - I'm jumping on the bandwagon too....Fighting this Facebook algorithm change, because I'm noticing I am not seeing so many of my friends posts. Here is how to avoid hearing from the same 26 FB friends and nobody else. This post explains why we don't see all posts from our friends. Funny, I thought if I followed you on Facebook I would see what you post. Not anymore.....

Your newsfeed recently shows only posts from the same few people, about 25, repeatedly the same, because Facebook has a new algorithm....

Their system chooses the people who will read your posts. However I would like to choose for myself, therefore, I ask you all a favor- if you are reading this message leave me a quick comment, a "hey" or sticker, whatever you want, so you will appear in my newsfeed please!

Otherwise Facebook chooses who to show me and I don't need Facebook to choose my friends. Please copy and paste on your wall so you can have more interaction with all your contacts and bypass the system. That's why we don't see all posts from our friends.

Hold your finger down anywhere on this post and "copy" will pop up. Click "copy". Then go to your page, start a new post on your page, then put your finger anywhere in the blank field. "Paste" will pop up and click on it to paste. Thank you all!

Variations of this hoax have been circulating since at least February 2018, and Facebook comprehensively debunked it at the time. But that clearly didn't halt its spread.

The problem is that by the time a fooled user realizes it's total hookum, it's too late — they've already copy-pasted it, sharing it with their friends, allowing it to keep going viral across the social network.

That said, there is an extremely convoluted and twisted kernel of truth in here — Facebook's algorithm does make judgement about which of your friends it thinks you want to see content from, and then prioritizes them in your News Feed. And engaging with these friends' posts (and them engaging with your posts) will make them appear more frequently.

If you feel you are seeing only a limited number of posts from a limited number of people, there is a tried-and-true trick that will give you a different view of your News Feed: have it show you the "Most Recent" posts rather than its default, "Top Stories."

To do this on the desktop click on "News Feed" in the left-hand column and then on "Most Recent."

This view of the News Feed is harder to find on the mobile app. First click on the "three lines" symbol (next to the notifications bell symbol). Then click on "See More" then on "Most Recent."

But the "facts" this hoax claims, and its purported fix? Dead wrong.

BLOGGER'S TWO CENTS. OK then! I would have completely ignored this bogus thing, except that in the last two days, two of my Facebook friends have copied and pasted the "hold your finger down" version, along with "This REALLY WORKS!!" AND "Four of my friends told me this works!!" These are not people who write in this style - in fact they are published writers - so it's obvious to me they DIDN'T WRITE IT!!

Any time anything is copied and pasted in this way, it means something funny is going on, or something not-so-funny. "Viral" things that turn out to be completely bogus make me angry. It dismays me when I see otherwise intelligent people falling for something so completely lame. It highlights the "I saw it on the internet, therefore it must be true" mentality that is still going around among people who seem to have powers of discernment. Perhaps they WANT it to be true (while we're using all caps), but that doesn't mean it is. 

When you get this sent to you or see it posted and it's from a friend, it's a knee-jerk reaction to believe it, because your Facebook friend who would NEVER delude you is sending it. That person conveniently ignores the clunky, exclamation-point-ridden style which screams "cut and paste", and the ludicrous repetition which means someone has glommed together a couple of the many versions of it without editing. This one randomly claims "four different people" have had good results with it, which proves beyond the shadow of a doubt. . . (And I am so glad these were four "different" people, not four of the same person.)

I will perhaps believe these things - perhaps - if I see them written in that person's OWN voice and in their OWN writing style. (I just can't get off this all-caps thing!). If they then tell me what their personal experience has been with this method to "bypass the system", well then - 

Yesterday a Facebook friend posted another version of this (and there are always overlapping versions going around just to muddy the waters), and was debunked by discerning friends. Today, another friend (a writer friend) posted this:

All right. Four different people have told me this genuinely works and I miss seeing a lot of my friends posts. So I’m gonna give it a try. I heard you do have to comment and some say you don’t ?? What gives ?
Yes Adding bypass It work It WORKS!! I have a whole new news feed. I’m seeing posts from people I haven’t seen in years.
Here’s how to bypass the system FB now has in place that limits posts on your news feed. I
Their new algorithm chooses the same few people - about 25 - who will read your posts. Therefore,
Hold your finger down anywhere in this post and "copy" will pop up. Click "copy". Then go your page, start a new post and put your finger anywhere in the blank field. "Paste" will pop up and click paste.
This will bypass the system.
Thank you It WORKS!! I have a whole new news feed. I’m seeing posts from people I haven’t seen in years.

Can I pick this apart? Would a professional writer say "friends posts"? Then there is "some say you don't?? What gives?" This is NOT her writing. Definitely not. Nor is this: "Yes. Adding bypass It works It WORKS!! Come on, people, that is nuts."

I might believe it, perhaps, if someone posted, "I saw this thing about bypassing the Facebook algorithm and decided to give it a try," with personal results. Which would be exactly nothing.

People say, "Hey, it does no harm." Yes it does. It leads me around by the nose, it deludes me, and I hate that. As with fake news, I no longer know what to believe. What a waste of energy, and what a phony and disappointing vibe to get from a Facebook friend.

A long time ago I got a "questionnaire" I had to publicly fill out, all about the color of my panties, my bra size, how I behave when drunk, how many men I've had, etc. It was all in the name of "breast cancer awareness". This was nowhere near the date for that day and turned out to be a complete hoax designed to embarrass people, including me (and it was sent by a close friend!). But if you refused to take it, people were hurt, angry and edged away from you, or even unfriended you for "not caring about breast cancer". At very least, you were chided for being a poor sport for criticizing something that was all in good fun and completely harmless.

I care about breast cancer, but what I don't care about are bogus posts meant to humiliate me in public and blur the line between genuine information and absolute dreck. This truly is a life-and-death matter, and meaningless questionnaires are of no use, cause confusion and even do harm. But a number of people claimed it actually DID "raise awareness" of breast cancer, meaning women all ran to have a completely unnecessary mammogram, or just said, "OH! I had no idea there was such a thing as breast cancer. I'm so glad I'm aware."

Meantime, let's say it all together:

Yes Adding bypass It work It WORKS!! It's just that the university professor who cut and pasted the message was having an off day.

My sweetie my dear precious sweetie how are you?

Strange are the ways of Facebook. Nearly as strange as the ways of the world. I've received spammy things in my "filtered messages" file, such as:

Hello you got a nice sparkling smile i'm David by name

i do everything at I AM A GENERAL CONTRACTOR

HELLO PRETTY LADT I WAS JUST PASSING WHEN I SEE YOUR WONDERFUL BEAUTIFUL FACE I WAS CATIVATED IF YOU DONT MINE CAN WE BE FRIENDS

Hello Dear what a nice smile you got,am new on here please can we be friends? i stumbled on your profile and notice your wonderful smile and decided to say hello. Always wear that smile.

You and Justine Favour aren't connected on Facebook
Lives in Kharkov, Ukraine

hi, my name is Grace, i saw your profile and i became interested to know more about you, please can you give me the chance to know more about you? i will be very happy to be your good friend . this is my private E_mail ( babegrace222 (@) yahoo.co.uk ) PLEASE DON'T REPLY ME HERE. CONTACT ME THROUGH MY PRIVATE E_MAIL, SO THAT I WILL SEND YOU MORE PRIVATE PICTURES ( babegrace222@yahoo.co.uk )

Never mind that my profile pictures are usually photos of horses or parrots or vintage cars, or something else non-human. They still think I have a wonderful smile.

I've also seen some suspiciously click-baity-looking Facebook pages which plaster generic comments all over unrelated pages, i. e. history or science or WTF?? Dumb Video of the Day!! These pages have names like Wisdom of Life or Gateway of Peace or whatever. I don't know the purpose of these pages, and I don't want to know. But I find it irritating to have to skip over long, florid, pointless comments that have nothing whatsoever to do with the subject matter.

That is, it irritated me UNTIL TODAY. Today I encountered a Facebook comment that blew all those other Facebook comments out of the water. It cascaded down from the mountaintop of gibberish like a landslide of mind-numbing, soul-sucking irrelevancy. It was on one of my favorite mindless, funny-animals-doing-crazy-things-in-short-little-videos-that-don't-tax-your-mental-capacity pages, and the comment related to a video of very large wet dogs bounding around that looked like mastiffs with poodle coats.

Sharon Stewart My sweetie my dear precious sweetie how are you?I hope you had a good productive morning, I wish you The best evening ever, I think about you so much as I worked this morning,I'm always thinking about you,you lives in my heart thoughts, and my mind,try to feel good and happy in your heart and mind, try to feel good about yourself inside out, drink enough water for the day,takes the best care of yourself, love and respect yourself dear sweetie it's the greatest love of all, be temperate in all that you do, you are worthy,I appreciates and adores you,you are a beautiful person inside out, you are my dear precious baby sweetie, I cares about you and love you with an intense passion, nothing will ever seperates you from my heart that loves you dear sweetie, I will never leave you,I might be late with these letters, however I will show up,I'm here writing to you for a positive reason,I will be traveling home in a hour time,I'm free for the weekend, you are strong dear sweetie, we are going to get through this raging storm together, I'm trying to tolerate you dear sweetie,I still have to try harder,as there are things I'm still learning about you each day dear sweetie,the truth of the matter is,which ever way you flip the coin I just have to find the extra strength to cope,because love never gets weary,love don't give up,love do not keeps record of wrong,love has power over everything, even death,enjoy your evening ,I will rest for 15 minutes,then I have to get ready to travel with the bus home,you will hear me later my dear precious baby sweetie. I love you dear sweetie with my life,I promise you,I will try to be quite and not responsive to everything, its my way of talking,I have no friends I'm talking to,you is my friend dear sweetie,you is my baby,my heart,my life,my everything dear sweetie,I can't do without you my dear precious baby sweetie. ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤💋💋

Susan Viscum-Stewart Sounds like a fake letter by one of those people trying to get money out of a lonely, vulnerable person. Manage

Sharon Stewart Susan what ever your name is,even though money plays a vital role in our daily existence,there are things that money cannot buy,happiness is the most sought after emotion,and the most unhappy people in this world are those with x amount of money,life is the most precious gift on the planet earth or in space,,there's nothing that can substitute life,money cannot replace life (the founder for Apple The late great Steve Jobs would be still here if money could restore his life),don't criticise the empathy and humility of a person,in this crazy world where everyone is busy loving themselves, it's not often you see this kind of love reaching out from across this deep blue sea to instigate a dispondent heart,thoughts,and mind to feel good and happy, suzan I think you would be quicker here to support violence,we should be ready and quick to be a good person ,instigates others to be,and not be quick to tear down a good intention and interest. Manage

I don't know what to add to that. I don't know what I CAN add to
that. I of course clicked on Sharon Stewart's home page (and what a suspiciously generic-sounding name that is, much like the names of many randomly nasty trolls who live to post vile comments everywhere). Well, there was nobody home. Just nothing there.

When that happens,whether on Facebook or YouTube or anywhere, I sort of get out of there. Fast. I think the page exists for the sake of spamming, for some mysterious
reason I haven't figured out yet.

Please excuse the weird line-spacing here. My blog just had a nervous breakdown
from all that foreign cut-and-paste. My computer skills are circa 2007, so you will
have to forgive me.

(Later) BUT WAIT! There's more. Since I can never leave anything alone, I checked this morning to see if there was anything more from "Sharon", and there was! Spelling and grammar were equally atrocious, and the message even more garbled. Don't make those bots mad, whatever you do.

Sharon Stewart Margaret Gunning if that's your real name,I am smelling fake here,I won't allow you instigate me to feel bad and disgusting as you are feeling,as I was reading what you posted here,it did not take me a minute to take the message out of your event,I'm so sorry Margaret ,I can't help you catch up with happiness and peace of mind,that is out of your reach,my advice to is,sow good seeds,over rocks and mountain,over hills and valley,for whatsoever seeds you sow,you will reap,you won't stop me from sowing my good seeds here on the rocks of social media Margaret, my philosophy is *good*,to be a good person,and instigates others to be good also.

Trolls! Trolls! Everyone trolls!

It has been a while since I posted about trolls. In fact, I can't remember if I ever posted about them at all, so I guess it's time.

I now belong to not one, not two, but THREE Facebook troll groups. By the time I actually post this, I might belong to zero troll groups, because I have gone back and forth a lot in my feelings about them.

Yes, it's nice to connect with people who love their trolls and have an enthusiasm for them. No, it's not so great to have someone push and push and push to try to sell expensive trolls to me, or tell me they collect nothing but one-of-a-kind 24" trolls from Denmark that Thomas Dam created with his own two hands in 1942. Or see photos of ultra-expensive trolls posing on the deck of a cruise ship, or in a room with a view in Sicily. Or see someone casually mention a small collection of, oh, say, about 5000 or so Dam trolls, only the finest and the oldest, and -

You know what I'm saying. It's all the same problems I have had with social media from the beginning. Troll elitism! It's beyond my powers to comprehend.

My trolls, the ones I started out with until I began to branch out a little, came from the wrong side of the tracks. They came in a little plastic bag:

. . . and cost me, rounded off, about $5.00 each at the dollar store. I had never seen a troll at the dollar store before, so soon I was stoking my collection and making them little felt outfits. I began replacing their silky but rather sparse hair with great spills of yarn, the fibres all pulled apart for maximum volume.

I thought they looked great! 

Needing a place to store them and not wanting to just use a shelf, I  converted some old CD racks and began to stack them in. 

There weren't too many at first.

I am not sure which troll group I joined first, but it didn't make me very happy, even though I got some initial "likes" for my poorhouse trolls in their CD highrise.

But I still had the feeling they were from a different social stratum, and I was never allowed to forget it. People talked in "troll-ese", I am convinced to make people left out who DIDN'T speak troll-ese. It didn't occur to me that Facebook and its intentional envy syndrome had anything to do with it.

But then the inevitable happened, and I began to "covet". I knew I couldn't begin to afford the holy grail ones, but even the mid-sized Dam trolls cost plenty, what with outrageous shipping charges and conversion of the American dollar to Canadian.

But I went ahead. I looked on eBay, I ordered trolls, I bought trolls. I couldn't help myself.

I don't know how to feel about it now. I haven't counted how many trolls I have, and I don't want to, though I did move a bookcase into my office for the overflow. I have spent a lot of money, for me at least, which translates to a few hundred. Money I can't spare. I think I still like my "Dollarinas" best, my yarnies with all the masses of hair I created from material I already had. But the problem is, their faces all look pretty much the same. They're identical cousins. Their bodies are so fragile, knockoffs of knockoffs made of thin plastic, that you could squish them flat by sitting on them.

The feeling is exciting when I order "real" trolls, and even more exciting when I get them and open the box. It's Christmas morning! One of my faves is the one I call Grumpy Grandpa:

But now I want another one. With the same face. Should I get it?

Collections are horrible things, voracious, insatiable. I've never really had one before, and now I don't know what to do. Stop buying them, maybe?

Am I honestly trying to reproduce my Year of the Trolls when I was ten years old, which was (though of course I didn't know it at the time) the best year of my life?

I've been blocked! The dark side of Facebook

What? you may ask me. A dark side? How can that be? Easy. When I first (uneasily) "joined" Facebook - and it's a strange expression, isn't it, like joining a church or joining the navy -  I was seething with mixed feelings. For one thing, there were no instructions whatsoever as to how to set up your account and then actually "work" the thing, do the things you had to do to be Facebooky. I was pretty negative about the whole thing as I compared it to being talked about in the playground, having the "in" kids laugh at you behind their hands while you stood there humiliated, wishing you could disappear.

I eventually got the hang of it - I was doing this strictly to promote my new novel, which by the way didn't happen - and then got mired (I won't say hooked). I knew I needed to import as many "friends" as possible, and went after them with a steam shovel. I thought that was how you did it! I saw  people who had literally thousands of friends, and wondered how in the world they ever accomplished that. Did it just happen by itself? Why wasn't it happening to ME by itself? Was I the wrong blood type or what?

Then I started getting these notices from Facebook. Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!  They looked officious and I was meant to be terrified by them. Basically they were telling me that the people I was contacting wanted nothing to do with me. Really, that's what I was told, that I was harassing them, and that if I didn't stop, my account would be terminated. It was completely baffling. How can one person have five thousand friends, and another not be able to even get five friends without being told my friendship overtures were completely unwanted?

Because I didn't know what I was doing, I just blundered along. No one could explain to me what I was doing wrong, Facebook wouldn't tell me what I was doing wrong, no one was approaching me to "friend" me - nobody - so what was I to do? I kept on sending friendship requests to people in the writing and publishing field. That's why I was doing this. To connect. After a while I did get a good number of acceptances. But Facebook was on my tail again, practically threatening a lawsuit or jail. 

Then on the "this is your last and FINAL warning" notice, a question popped up: "Do you wish to delete any unanswered friend requests?"

Delete. . . say what? Delete unanswered. . . how do you do that?

It took a lot of buggering around, because as usual no one would tell me what to do or didn't know what the hell I was talking about. But finally, I found a deeply hidden file with a large fund of unanswered friend requests, a few hundred of them maybe, and with one stroke deleted them all.

Presto! Problem solved. I never heard from Facebook again. It seems the problem was . . .  too many unanswered friend requests! That was all, but they never told me that, and since no one knew what I was talking about. . . 

I'm not a natural on Facebook, but I am learning there's a way to use it. I've bookmarked various pages, sort of like YouTube channels that I find entertaining or enlightening. The news feed refreshes every 67 hours, so I don't get much out of that. It's just slow as hell. Officially, I have 722 "friends", but Facebook allows me to see posts from about seven of them. Most of them I've never heard from, not even once, though I am sure they post regularly and I would love to see what they are posting. 

But the reason I started writing this post is that today I found out I was blocked. Blocked is forever, basically. I know, because I've had to do it myself from time to time. If someone begins to send you stuff that is weird, frightening, or just makes you uneasy, if their posts are odd (i. e. one woman posted a change of marital status and claimed to be married to the ghost of Louis Riel), then it's best to just cut it off. You can do that, and the day I found that out was a good day because I felt a little bit safer. 

Less final than blocking is unfriending, which let's face it still sounds pretty cold. If I walked up to someone I used to like and said, "Hi! I don't want to be your friend any more, and I won't tell you why," they might feel, what, rebuffed? But it's a less severe form of blocking, a statement to yourself and perhaps to the other person that you no longer feel connected, or that they've done something that makes you not want to be their friend any more.

I realize I don't have to say any of this. You know already. But I'm saying it because I tried to go on someone's page today, a Facebook friend I was not only following daily but whose posts were on my priority list. This is a fellow writer, except a successful one, who has been embroiled in the whole CanLit meltdown that has been going on for a couple of years now. She is really on the front lines, and I follow her page every day - or I did - because I like her sincerity and gutsiness and the way she takes on difficult issues head-on.

And - it looks like she has blocked me. Either that, or her page has completely vanished, and I don't think that's how it happens.

I did post a few comments on her page in the last couple of days, but I can't see that they were incendiary remarks.They expressed frustration at feeling like a failure because none of my novels sold. It was weird, because HER post seemed more incendiary than mine. The whole reason I follow her page is that she is such a champion of free speech. She believes everyone has the right to be heard. I can see having my comments deleted, I can see being unfollowed or unfriended or even being messaged and told to can the remarks before I did any more damage. But this??

Then I checked the page of another Facebook friend, a very brave and gutsy lady in the CanLit field who has been publishing some blazing articles about the current literary debacle. She has unfriended me, apparently. We are no longer friends, and I don't know why.

Just like that. It's over.

I know there's such a thing as Facebook envy and social media stress. Young people are especially prone to it. This is not the right environment for a person like me who hates impression-management and frantic accumulation of likes, who hates to feel like she's the only one on the playground who can't speak Ish-kabibble. Yet I haven't closed my account yet, and I still check it daily. And I am not sure why.

Yesterday I joined a group - hey, ME joining a group! - of troll fanciers. Yes, a group of people like me who collect trolls, because they remind me of my childhood, of being ten and watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and playing trolls with my girl friends. Right now it is the only good thing I can see about Facebook. I've been blocked by one friend - someone I really admire - and I don't know why. I've been unfriended by someone I really don't know, but who used to be my friend, and I don't know why.

It feels like my fate to get lousy results, whether from my three novels (awful sales, all of them, in spite of very good reviews), or my Facebook page or my YouTube videos (some of which get no views at all, ever). If I used these things to define my worth, I would be in so much trouble I might not get up tomorrow morning. I might not be breathing. So I don't.

And yet, for all that, I feel bruised. I feel bruised that someone I don't even know personally has blocked me, doesn't want me even seeing her page, and does not want to see my page ever again. I just don't get it. Others have quietly bailed on me, I am sure, as I have quietly bailed on others. But this is a little different. 

I can't play the game, obviously, I've had so much proof it should be blatantly obvious. But part of me wanted this, wanted to be accepted as a writer, as someone who could make a contribution. It didn't happen. But it gets worse when someone who DID make a contribution doesn't want to see me any more, and I don't even understand why.