For Adam Reisman, the requests were puzzling.
“I’m getting at least two Facebook friend requests a day from very beautiful (albeit clearly photoshopped) Asian women,” the blogger wrote in a post expressing both helplessness and scorn. “Some days I’ve gotten as many as 10 requests.”
That was two years ago.
Alarm Bells
Since then Facebook appears to have rolled its friend requests of this kind into a more generic and perhaps misleading, “Facebook Friend Suggestions.”
Countless users, including this reporter, have been inundated with such “suggestions.”
And while acolytes of the Silicon Valley power structure appear to support nearly any new tactic that increases engagement with the platform, some have raised alarm bells about the ongoing campaign.
Whether it originates with Facebook itself or is a loophole exploited by scam artists is not clear.
But that it is suspicious and potentially harmful appears probable.
Few variations
Take the experience of one user (my own—which inspired me to write about this).
Shortly after I installed WhatsApp (also owned by Meta) in my iPhone and had a long conversation in Chinese with a friend (I happen to speak Mandarin after living overseas for over a decade), the messages began.
They were “Facebook Friend Suggestions,” and they were uniformly of young Chinese women in suggestive poses.
Some were in bed, with the covers revealing a long arm or leg. Others were in skirts draped open to reveal legs folded flat, inner thighs against calves. Others were simply closeups of faces with long white noses and tiny mouths flecked with blotches of red lipstick.
They were so uniform, so alike, that they were hypnotic.
Like seeing a snowflake multiple times, each time with a single variation.
In Chinese
And what was most revealing (or was I being paranoid?) was that the messages were all in Chinese.
“I just got divorced,” wrote the most recent one, from Zhang Yixin, who ostensibly hails from Kaohsiung, Taiwan. “I’m so lonely by myself at night. Isn’t there anyone who will comfort me? Who will care for me and hold me?”
The appeal closed with a line, as heartfelt, seemingly, as the above comments.
“Join me in a little chat. I’m waiting for you online.”
Then it gave a code and a link to the messenger app Line.
“A scam”
Like Reisman and others who posted about this, I was not only skeptical but worried.
Did Meta’s vast stores of data include the fact I used to work in China?
Others saw the entire charade as simply a scam.
Anthony Hughes, who identifies himself as a former military records expert at the National Personnel Records Center, wrote in his blog that the deluge of friend requests with “pretty young women” was an attempt by hackers to entice the user into the conversation—then be fooled into downloading software that will enable a hacker to steal money from bank accounts.
The plea, seemingly offered by the “pretty young women,” is that they need money to come join you for a weekend retreat.
A new take on addiction
It’s not that researchers don’t understand what’s going on: the various structures created by platforms like Facebook would seem to enable such schemes, if not launch them.
Amanda Baughan, a doctoral student in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington (UW), recently described “problems” as “the many mechanisms that seek to draw people in and keep them on a site.”
She described these as “the rewards structure that keeps you on the hunt for content that might scratch your brain in the way you find most appealing,” in a UW press release.
Baughan did not respond to emailed queries for this article.
But in other comments, she has sought to find less antagonistic language for what critics say are the addictive properties of social media (some say intentionally addictive).
Baughan, for instance, has sought to recharacterize the experience of being caught and seemingly trapped by social media feeds as “dissociative, rather than addictive.”
She writes that “dissociation can be part of healthy cognitive functioning” and compares scrolling on social media to daydreaming or reading “a good book.”
Daydreaming as repressed desires
But daydreaming, itself, according to Sigmund Freud, in his “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,” is the act of finding an outlet for repressed desires, desires that have been crushed by reality and are given somewhat of a free reign in these musings. According to Freud, these involve sexual repression, ways that sexual desire has been sublimated, or stored unfulfilled in the subconscious.
In this way, perhaps, there might be some overlap between Baughan’s comparison of endless scrolling on social media to “daydreaming.” Both, in a psychoanalytic interpretation of this vein, involve giving partial vent to repressed sexual desires.
The advent of Facebook Friend Suggestions, involving the delivery of desirable and haunting photos of young women, to men, seems to fit such a comparison to the tee.
Industry funding
Still, this is not a comparison that Baughan and others would likely admit.
Her attempts to reframe addiction to social media as “dissociation” are in stark contrast to the dire warnings advanced by educators and researchers about the effects of the overuse of such platforms as Instagram and Facebook particularly on teenagers.
Baughan spent two years working at Google, and as a research intern there, according to her webpage.
Her doctoral studies are being pursued at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft, gave $14 million to the University of Washington to build the institution. Most of the rest of the total $110 million in funding costs came from Amazon and Google.
Suspicions
But, in the end, how problematic is it for Facebook Friend Suggestions to be showing up in your inbox on a regular basis? You could, after all, just ignore them.
Just ask Kyle Jo, who in the recent past published a post about her reckoning with such bombardment, in a Quora account.
“Why would my husband automatically start receiving a bunch of friend requests on Facebook from women that are wanting him to hit a WhatsApp link?” began her lament. “Is it because he is using WhatsApp or dating sites?”
Thus began her journey into hell—a hell of suspicion.
The discussion that followed contained abominable—and eerily recognizable—fears and jealousies that seemed to spread across the Internet.
Marriage troubles
“Once you start getting the feeling that your husband is betraying your trust behind your back, it can keep you thinking all day and night,” was one response.
The recommendation was to track her husband’s WhatsApp messages or his cell phone.
“Has he been getting apprehensive lately whenever you walk in on him using his phone? Or uncomfortable about your presence when he’s using his phone. So he tucks it away and tries to evade you when you ask with whom he’s chatting. He’s most probably been talking to a secret lover,” wrote the respondent.
But just when you thought this was a concerned fellow netizen, it appears all the fearmongering and jealousy was simply a way to sell a product.
The respondent recommended a special software item that would enable the enraged and worried wife to track her husband without any noticeable signs.
We don’t know what happened to the marriage.
