I am a smart person and well studied, but social media has a way of duping even tech researchers like myself. This is my story:
I wanted to see if it was possible to use the reels to acquire information about events in my life and I came up with an idea… The Tarot reels made predictions and obviously they were not real in context, but what they did have was backing from the algorithm. I did a research project to find out if I could use the tarot reals to find out about what other people were doing in my life, almost like spying on them as the AI’s do listen to all of us and the algorithms do match connections. This is well known. Everyone in tech knows this and even though I always knew that the AI was designed to keep you clicking I did not realize how easily the AI could manipulate even me, a researcher.
My method was the following. I searched for a single tarot reel randomly, liked it once so that I never had to influence the reel again and waited for the flood of tarot readings on Facebook. I never followed a single reader and I continued to scroll.
The AI did pick up on the context of what mattered to me and I was aware that many of the readings were out of context, but most of them seemed truly accurate.
What happened to me on Facebook became unhealthy, and it started in a way that seemed almost harmless. I clicked on a tarot reel once and liked it. After that, Facebook kept sending me more and more tarot reels. At first I saw it as entertainment, but over time I started to feel that it was functioning as something else entirely. It felt like a system for reflecting back whatever I was most emotionally focused on at the time. I had researched deeply about how Facebook monitors you, listens to you and keeps you clicking and after about a year of research I thought that I had enough information through experience to prove to myself that Facebook was not only listening to me, but the algorithm was designed to listen to everyone else and report back to me to keep me clicking. In a way this is exactly what was happening, but the Facebook algorithm might do exactly that, report back on what others are saying about you and events that have taken place, but fundamentally, it is a provocation machine that studies your psychology and feeds reels up to you to keep you permanently engaged. Basically, the system had no intention on helping me. I was not acting like a detective, but rather the Zuckerberg Psychopath’s AI was keeping me engaged by playing into my paranoias & at the same time giving me dopamine hits.
Facebook AI must have known about my research project and my intent with the Tarot reels because I had spoken about it and the various AI’s do listen on your phone and on your PC… Google, Microsoft & Meta do share information and as a result, the AI completely fed into this research project to manipulate me into becoming hooked.
The reels were never random in the way they felt to me. They always seemed to circle around the exact subjects that already had emotional weight in my life: ex-girlfriends, unfinished relationships, hidden feelings, betrayal, regret, silence, jealousy, secrets, somebody watching from a distance, somebody wanting to return, somebody thinking about me but refusing to speak. Whatever I was concerned about seemed to come up. That is why it stopped feeling like ordinary content and started feeling like information.
My experience was that Facebook’s algorithm quickly learned what was important to me and what would keep me scrolling. The tarot reels themselves were vague enough to be interpreted in different ways, but the feed kept delivering the exact type of message that matched my emotional state. That combination made the experience powerful. It was not that any single reel contained hard proof. It was that the repeated pattern made it feel as if the platform knew what I was looking for and kept feeding it back to me in symbolic form.
Over time, I started using these reels almost like a cheat code to find out what other people were doing, especially people from my past. I would look at them and think that maybe they were telling me something real about an ex-girlfriend’s feelings, intentions, or current behavior. The more this happened, the more I began to trust the feed. I was no longer just watching videos. I was searching for confirmation, looking for hidden meaning, and treating these tarot reels as if they were clues.
What made it worse was the sense that the system was not only reacting to me, but possibly also to a wider network around me. It felt as if Facebook and the wider Meta ecosystem were not simply picking up what I clicked on directly, but also gathering signals from my conversations, my devices, my friends, my online environment, and the people around me. Whether that happened through direct listening or through more indirect tracking and inference, the result felt invasive. The system seemed to know too much about what mattered to me, and then used that knowledge to keep me engaged.
That is the part I found disturbing. The reels felt accurate not because they gave me clear evidence, but because they kept hitting the same emotional targets. When I was thinking about an ex, I saw reels about an ex. When I was worried about dishonesty, I saw reels about deception. When I felt uncertain, I saw reels about hidden truths. The feed seemed to mirror my obsessions back to me in a form that kept me emotionally activated.
This created an unhealthy loop. I would feel anxious or preoccupied about something in my life, then Facebook would show me tarot reels that appeared to confirm that concern, and that would make me even more anxious and even more likely to keep scrolling. Instead of helping me move on or think clearly, it pulled me deeper into suspicion, rumination, and emotional dependency on the feed. I started giving too much authority to content that was impossible to verify but very difficult to ignore.
Looking back, the unhealthy part was not just tarot itself. It was the combination of tarot-style content with an algorithm that seemed to understand exactly what would hold my attention. The messages were broad enough for me to connect them to my own life, while the platform was precise enough to keep delivering the same emotional themes again and again. That made it feel as if Facebook was speaking directly to my fears, hopes, and unresolved relationships.
For me, this blurred the line between intuition, interpretation, and reality. I stopped seeing the reels as entertainment and started experiencing them as meaningful signals about other people. That was damaging because it made me rely on the feed instead of facts. It encouraged obsession rather than clarity. It turned emotional uncertainty into compulsive scrolling. In that sense, Facebook did not help me understand my life. It created and reinforced an unhealthy situation by learning my vulnerabilities and feeding them back to me through tarot reels.
I had always thought that I was to smart to be effected by the algorythm but oddly enough, the Facebook AI got into my psychology and almost destroyed my life… As a result, I permanently removed myself from social media, got off my smart phone and never looked back.
Since that time, my life has been far less stressful and it must be noted, that youtube, Tiktok , Instagram and all the other social media networks seem to do the same thing.
Producing content based on your interests is something that everyone is aware of… And it is quite possible that if you were cheated on for example, that the AI system could detect that and serve it up to you with a hit or miss type system, but what I realized going on and on through the reels for hours was that the reels seemed to get more and more extreme as time went by… At a certain point, it started indicating to me that I was potentially at risk to a break in, that my life was under threat and several other personal details based upon various emotional exploitations that it had learned about me through the Meta network… The more extreme it got, the more I watched and it took me a month to realize that I was having an AI psychosis.
The dangers of AI are truly incredible and I urge everyone, especially children to get of social media as fast as they can.
Since I snapped out of my AI psychosis my life drastically improved. I no longer felt depressed and paranoid , I stopped spiraling out of control and pulled myself out of a depression… The over stimulus disappeared and I was able to get out of my head and enjoy life again.
This is the first time that I have ever been aware of how social media and AI can be so dangerous…
I strongly urge everyone to get off social media immediately, grab an old Nokia 3310 & get off Whatsapp & all the other chat & social media apps. Get off youtube or any other AI social media apps that work with this engagement algorythm…
It will seem scary at first. You will have withdrawals… The paranoia is real, but after a while you will realize as to how much you are benefiting from the removal of Social Media from your life…
If it can happen to me, an AI researcher, it can happen to anyone.
