Facebook is full of scammers, bots, attention whores, and impostors

In November of 2024, I decided to add every friend suggested and went from about 300 to 5,000 in a few days. I was quickly bombarded with messages that all asked the same questions: where I live, what I do for a living, etc. So the novelty wore off fast and last week I decided it was time to cut ties with the many disingenuous people I'd befriended online. 

Sex scammers are by far the most common. After that comes money, weight loss, and religion. Not much of a surprise there. I'm tempted to estimate that somewhere around 90% of Facebook profiles are fraudulent in one way or another. If there's a sucker logging into Facebook every minute, there are at least 10 to take him it seems.

I suppose in retrospect this should not be surprising on a platform that has basically no barriers to entry. 

The main lessons I see are: it is easy to accumulate Facebook friends and it is also easy to get random women to send you naked or almost naked pictures and videos of themselves.

My experiment in having 5,000 Facebook friends

It began in early November. I was curious if there was a maximum number of friends and if so, what was the limit? It turns out Facebook limits you to 5,000 friends. This is interesting because the average user only has about 200 friends. Interestingly, that is very close to the Dunbar number, which says that the average person can maintain stable relationships with about 150 people.

I used very little discretion and simply friended every suggestion in the order I got them until I hit the limit. Here's what I learned: there are a lot of scammers, impostors, and suckers on Facebook. The most common scams involve sex or pornography, though a great deal of porn is given away as free samples. So yeah, if you want strangers to message you with pornographic images or videos, just friend a bunch of random young women. Or rather, profiles that have pictures of young women.

There are many celebrity impersonators, which I found amusing. The lie itself is audacious, but the real entertainment comes from the gullible people who think they actually have a famous friend. It's just a big case of Santa Claus for adults. 

There are better aspects. I have friended people from all over the world and now have a francophone pen pal, among others. Had I been more selective, I could have gotten a pen pal of just about any language.

Oh, if someone uses the word "alaye", it means: "I am a scammer, so if you are also a scammer, let's stop wasting time with each other". So there is a kind of honor among thieves after all. 

My Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=25833503