Facebook Thinks I Should Be Vegan 

Honestly, it doesn’t make any sense at all. It began about a month ago when I decided to share a post from my friend, Dairy Carrie (our cows ran for president). It was something about dairy farming, and I often share her stuff, but this time was different. Facebook would not let me share it. On the second try, it told me my account was doing something suspicious and forced me to reset my password.

Doesn’t that seem like going to extremes to make something unsharable? Sure, there’s always someone who gets offended, but to go so far as to make me change my password by force to try and prevent me from doing something?

If the stick doesn’t work then try the carrot.

Yesterday, Facebook suggested a new group for me to join, a so-called dairy group. With a name like Farmer Bright, I would hope the algorithm would understand that I like milking cows. I post stuff about dairy farming all the time. No, Facebook decided I should join a dairy hating vegan group. A vegan group! As my six-year old says, “Are you kidding me?” He’s missing a front tooth and it always sounds funnier coming from him.

The group was meme after meme of dairy farmers are evil and all kinds of bad. I think my only option is to post multiple photos of grilling out steaks tomorrow night and tall glasses of milk to see if Mr. Zuckerburg and company will take a hint that I am a dairy loving meat eater.

It might be easy to call this coincidence, but are there coincidences in machine learning? If I were writing one of my detective stories I might remind the reader that there are no such things as coincidences!

All kidding aside, Facebook does some neat things in finding connections, but my feed kind of got annoying during the politics of last year.  Thank goodness for the unfollow-but-remain-friends option. While I do like curated content directed at me, increasingly it seems we’re in a bubble seeing the same old thing over and over. I’ve chosen not to “like” some things I normally would to see if it makes a difference.

Despite this, maybe I should be happy that even with all of my sharing Facebook still doesn’t quite have me pegged. Yet.