Tag: social media

I have left Microsoft’s LinkedIn fantasy-and-bluster social media platform.

I trashed my LinkedIn account at 1800 JST today, October 28, 2025.

The reasons are various, including:

  • Microsoft’s promoting of users, many identifying as “founders,” “entreprenuers,” or “creators,” and who post bluster that they are the best thing since sliced bread and present fantasies bragging that they never lose, despite facing tremendous obstacles,
  • Microsoft’s punishing of users with the temerity to be honest or disagree with the Microsoft social media business model, by shadow-banning their posts,
  • Microsoft’s incessant promoting of AI and promoting of AI promoters, and, last but certainly not least,
  • Microsoft’s recently revealed sycophantic donation to a major destruction project in the land of the free and the home of the bang, bang, you’re a dead motherfucker.

Remaining on LinkedIn would simply have meant granting a continuing license to the Church of LinkedIn to steal my attention and time. I fixed that problem at 1800 JST today.

I can be reached, of course, by methods noted in my company’s parent website.

What has cyberspace turned into?

On “normal” social media platforms:

  • AI-generated videos of UK royalty dancing with their royal children.
  • Crotch shots of AI-generated female athletes with definition in the crotch area that would get them disqualified from whatever AI-generated event they were going to compete in.
  • AI-generated dogs saving the lives of AI-generated babies.
  • AI-generated aircraft crashing onto the decks of AI-generated aircraft carriers.
  • AI-generated cars crashing into AI-generated trailer trucks.
  • AI-generated animals having AI-generated foreign objects removed from their skin by AI-generated veterinarians, this becoming common recently, along with many more, even more-revolting fake videos involving animals.
  • A constant stream of AI text slop from places like India, Macedonia, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Vietnam, often accompanied by unlawfully published photos, the poster neither giving credit for the images nor citing sources, and the slopper certainly not having permission to use the images.
  • A constant stream of ads—mostly confirmable as coming from Vietnam—for WiFi connection equipment and services in Japan, clearly aimed at Asian laborers who have been brokered into Japan to work.
  • Loan-shark ads aimed at foreign laborers working in Japan.
  • AI-generated voices of well-known people on a video of two seconds of the person to establish “authenticity” and continuing for several minutes with the faked voice but without any image, because the lip movement would give it away instantly. There are countless fake Neil deGrasse Tyson videos like this. The voice is very close, but the cadence of the fake narration clearly is not his. He has recently called this out in a video of his own, pointing out the damage this does to trust. This theft of images and spoofing of voices is criminal, but will go unpunished, thanks to the guaranteed anonymity of social media and apathy of users, many of whom have been numbed to this behavior by a torrent of unlawful posts.
  • Inspirational stories that never happened, mostly from places like Macedonia.
  • Ads claiming to sell you the method of getting rich quickly using ChatGPT. One recent testimonial boasts of being able to buy a luxury car and a home after just two months of stock market investment using ChatGPT.
  • Ads for underground banks aimed at Asian laborers in Japan who want to repatriate money they earn in Japan.

On some platforms, video slop you didn’t ask for and don’t need will autoplay after you watch something that you have actually elected to watch, requiring you to escape to avoid seeing it.

From the LinkedIn social media platform in particular—and it is as social media platform:

  • Vapid AI slop posts with both text and graphics generated AI, the subject matter of which most often being totally unrelated to what the poster purports to do when they are not generating AI slop.
  • AI-smelling text posts that evoke many comments, with each comment being replied to by AI, the replies being within a word or two of each other in length.
  • Microsoft-suggested posts promoting AI or promoting AI promoters.
  • Ads promoting AI.
  • Posts from soon-to-be-out-of-work translators claiming that AI will not replace human translators because AI doesn’t understand culture.
  • Unwanted irrelevant connection requests, mostly from the Global South (although I have fixed that problem).
  • Ads for paid webinars run or promoted by translation organizations to teach translators how to succeed and be better at jobs, although those jobs are quickly disappearing.
  • Translators’ organizations announcing activities of little or no relevance to translators working in the high-demand mainstream domains that are rapidly shrinking because of AI-using agencies.
  • Constant non-productive and futile complaints from freelance translators about this or that agency, this preaching to the choir constituting a waste of attention and time that could be better spent thinking about what to do next (hint: for most, it’s not freelance translation or probably translation at all).
  • Investment scam ads (including investment in mango plantations).
  • Ads for homes in Dubai for USD 1 million.

There you have it. Who could ask for anything more? More importantly, who asked for any of this?

LinkedIn is becoming just another social media cesspool.

In just a week or so, I have seen a rapid and disturbing increase in the number of posts thrown at me by Microsoft’s LinkedIn that are clearly Facebook-like engagement-harvesting slop.

A typical post describes at length some historical or current event that might have happened or a person, although some are clearly total fabrications. Sources are not cited, because there are none to cite.

Most of these posts are lengthy (as if someone told ChatGPT to write N hundred words about XYZ), and much of the writing has the undeniably cadence and style of AI.

Many of these posts are from non-anglophone places. Many of them are accompanied by AI-generated images, and sometimes by photographs that the poster is highly unlikely to have obtained permission to use. This turns a post that is merely annoying drivel into an unlawful act that is annoying drivel.

In any event, while Microsoft seems skilled at detecting when posts are in any way negative, particularly with regarding its platform or AI, and effectively shadow-bans such posts (as it did to this blog post today when it was uploaded to LinkedIn), it actively promotes the above-noted garbage, which is nothing more than AI-slop aimed at harvesting engagement for someone or something with nothing to say or offer.

This garbage needs to be kept on Facebook or other social media platforms, although an argument can be made that the social media platform called LinkedIn is rapidly coming to resemble the Facebook cesspool, and I’m making that argument.