Question Porn & grotesque click bait in Facebook stories

[J-Po]

Hi,

My elderly mom absolutely adores scrolling through Facebook on her android cell phone, looking at and 'liking' all kinds of posts about cute animals and interesting stories & photos.

All of a sudden recently, the "Story" feed at the top of her regular feed has entirely filled up with porn-y images, upsetting images (plastic surgery gone wrong, etc) and National Enquirer type stuff ('Joe Biden gets Stabbed!').

I'm not on Facebook that much, so I don't really know how any of this is supposed to work, but in my Facebook feed, the Stories are all from my Facebook Friends.

I checked mom's settings and her Story feed seems to be set to private/Friends, but there's not a single friend story showing there. And what's strange is that the names for the accounts that are posting this porn, etc are things like "Animals Story", "Dogs make us happy" "Cats are cute" which makes me think that she may have 'liked' a cute picture of an animal in her feed, and somehow that cute animal was a lure that got her on some kind of spam list?

I looked at her Friends and Groups list (nothing suspicious there). I went to: menu > Settings > News feed > Unfollow to see which "Pages" she follows, and there are a number of similar sounding "Pages" listed there ("Whisker World", etc), but none of the names match up with the names I see in her Stories, and when I went to "Whisker World," it's actually pictures of cats...

The only advice I could find to do is to manually 'mute' and/or 'unfollow' each story, which would A) take forever because there's a thousand of them and B) doesn't help me figure out how to prevent this from happening again.

Any and all advice would be appreciated!

-jp

 

[stonecarver]

My mom's pushing 80 and yup she's on face book. I'm always trying to help her navigate her safety on there but she won't listen. It's face book and I have a password. So I'm safe right..........Nooo mom

There is nothing on her facebook history she didn't drive to.

Best of luck.

 

[Ralston18]

My thought is to go "nuclear" and unfollow everybody. Then add back selected family and friends as required.

As I understand it, Facebook allows 200 "unfollows" at a time. Then wait a couple of hours and unfollow the next 200. Etc, etc..

All and all there are many links to be found regarding "unfollow".

For example:

https://circleboom.com/blog/unfollow-all-pages-at-once-on-facebook/

You can easily find similar links.

However, unless your mother is able to stop "liking" and can be convinced to not like (even if she does) there may not be much that you can do. Other than check more frequently and purge the undesirable "follows" each time.

Lastly - although I doubt that it will help much - contact Facebook.

Bad guys don't care and if the host platform does not take meaningful action then not much can be done.

I already have friends and family ditching Facebook for a variety of reasons. And, to be honest, I am very close to being able to do without Facebook myself. Too many emails about a family member/ friend posting and then Facebook shows me all sorts of things other than what the family member/friend just posted. Like going into a restaurant and getting served with what they want to feed you versus what you want to order or, even worse , ordered.

Without clicks none of those companies will survive.