Whose Dumpster Is This?

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — March 9, 2026

Every now and then, a user opens Facebook and has a moment of clarity. Mine came while scrolling through the helpful list of “People You May Know.” According to the platform, I apparently know a surprising number of strangers.

These are not people I have met. They are not people who share friends with me. They are not people who live anywhere near my life. Yet the system insists we should clearly be introduced.

Why? Nobody knows.

At this point a reasonable person begins to ask a reasonable question: whose dumpster is this?

Facebook once claimed its mission was to connect people. That sounded sensible fifteen years ago when users were adding coworkers, cousins, and that one friend from high school who still owed them twenty dollars.

Today the platform appears to operate on a slightly different philosophy. The system behaves less like a social network and more like a machine that woke up one morning, drank three gallons of espresso, and decided that every human on Earth should be randomly introduced to every other human on Earth.

“You live in the Philippines,” the algorithm seems to say. “This gentleman in Argentina enjoys motorcycles and inspirational quotes. Clearly you two should become friends.”

Thank you, Facebook. Your insight into my social life is inspiring.

The deeper question is whether this feature exists because someone designed it or because no one did. Modern social media platforms are no longer communities in the traditional sense. They are engagement engines.

If showing you a stranger might keep you scrolling for another twelve seconds, then congratulations—you have a new recommended friend.

This is not friendship. This is statistical experimentation.

In the early days of the internet, companies built systems to serve users. Today users serve the systems. Every click feeds the machine. Every scroll teaches it something about human behavior.

Apparently what it has learned is that humans will tolerate almost unlimited nonsense.

Which brings us back to the original question: whose dumpster is this?

Officially, the answer would be the executives and directors overseeing Meta, the company that owns Facebook. In practice, the real manager appears to be a collection of algorithms whose primary qualification is that they never sleep and never question their own decisions.

The result is a platform where strangers are recommended as friends, meaningful posts vanish into the void, and the loudest nonsense often spreads the fastest.

Somewhere, a computer proudly records this as “engagement.”

Perhaps that is the true genius of modern social media. It has successfully turned confusion, irritation, and endless arguments into a business model.

And the remarkable thing is that millions of people keep logging in to watch the dumpster burn.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com