Meta announced this week that it is handing more of your Facebook and Instagram feed over to artificial intelligence, letting its algorithms predict what you want to see before you even scroll.
The company frames it as personalization.
Read the fine print, and it looks more like a quiet transfer of editorial power from human judgment to machines that have never met you.
Better recommendations, less clutter, more of what you love.
But Meta has spent two decades nudging users toward whatever keeps them on the app longest.
Now the nudging is automated, scaled, and increasingly opaque.
Neither, arguably, will anyone at the company.
A teenager posting about a breakup may find it surfaced to strangers because the system learned that emotional content drives engagement.
A small business owner's post can vanish without explanation.
A parent's carefully curated feed becomes a slot machine that pays out in outrage and impulse buys.
The algorithm does not care about your family dinner.
This is the society-is-collapsing angle, and it is not hyperbole.
We have already watched algorithmic feeds amplify political division, flatten local news, and turn public health into a shouting match.
Handing more control to AI does not fix that.
The machine learns from a broken environment and then reproduces the breakage at a billion-user scale.
Meta will tell you humans remain in the loop.
That is technically true and practically meaningless.
When the loop is a billion posts and the human is a contractor with seconds per decision, the AI is the editor.
It also knows outrage is cheap and attention is the product.
You did not sign up to be sorted by a model you cannot inspect, trained on data you cannot see, tuned to goals you cannot vote on.
It is an arrangement where the terms keep changing and the exits keep narrowing.
Americans feel this in their gut even if they cannot name it.
First, stop treating the feed as neutral.
It is a curated artifact, and someone, or something, chose it for you.
Second, diversify where you get information, especially local news and people you know offline.
Third, pressure lawmakers who keep letting platforms grade their own homework.
It is just citizenship in a world where the algorithm is now a landlord.
The uncomfortable truth is that Meta is not uniquely villainous.
It is simply the largest example of a business model that profits from your distraction and calls it connection.
We are against being quietly managed by it.
If the feed is going to be written by machines, the least we can demand is a plain-English explanation of the rules and a real way to opt out.
Final Thoughts
Until then, assume you are the product, the subject, and the experiment.