Paradox Facebook Page /2020

For the Užupis University Institute for Applied Paradox we created a Facebook page that we completely hid it from the public. If you want to see the site and its content, you have to travel to a secret place on this earth. From any other place you cannot open the page and the link will be rejected as false. And even if a person travelled to this secret place, she could only see the first three entries of our page, all other lectures are only visible to the page administrators.

For an algorithm that aims for reach and engagement, it is completely incomprehensible why we hide from followers. Maybe out of pity, maybe out of charity, maybe even out of appreciation for our research, the algorithm continuously and emphatically wants to help us to become famous. However, the Facebook algorithm seems to be a little over-enthusiastic. It starts to produce senseless mistakes that we have never seen before on Facebook. We then document these errors and feed them back into the algorithm. Nobody likes to be confronted with her mistakes, apparently no algorithm either. Accordingly, it reacts with even more non-sense until the mobile app eventually crashes. We also document this and, again, feed it back into the algorithm etc. ad infinitum.

To give you an insight into our research and teaching, we now present three of the more than 50 lectures we have held so far:

This is a lecture post reposted as a new lecture. The first post contains a warning that our page is not reaching any people. We reposted this post and received the same warning again. At the same time the algorithm confirms that the latter post has reached two people.

This lecture shows an auto-generated offer to pay for facebook add. The algorithm offers to reach zero other people for paying zero money. Again, this post already reached two people.

This lecture shows a screenshot of another auto-generated offer proposing to advertise a blank image.