A Gozitan fisherman tends to injured seagulls each morning. A stray dog jealously guards its former owner’s grave. A café owner secretly places loaves of bread outside the door to feed the homeless.
Amid the wall-to-wall news coverage of political controversies, global conflicts and financial wrongdoing, a Facebook page named Infinite Facts has taken to posting heartwarming tales celebrating daily acts of kindness and heroism.
However, the feel-good stories are almost all entirely fabricated, an example of the AI slop that has come to define so much of today’s social media content.
Describing itself as a ‘Daily Update of Science and World Information,’ the Infinite Facts page posts multiple times each day, with each post often being more bizarre than the last.
On Sunday February 1 alone, the page posted eight different stories throughout the day.
In one story, a father roams the streets of Żabbar clutching a picture of his deceased son to his chest. In another, a child hikes along the Marsascala coast to visit the grave of a stray cat. A third speaks of an unnamed Maltese scientist whose discovery allowing crops to pull nitrogen from the air is revolutionising farming.
None of the stories were true, all fabricated either using AI-generated images or repurposed photographs, accompanied by a seemingly AI-generated caption extolling the virtues of the story’s subject.
Going further back in time reveals even more outlandish stories.
One post earlier last month told readers how Malta was set to introduce solar-powered pavements allowing pedestrians to charge their phones as they walk. In another, ferry crew and passengers helped deliver a pregnant woman’s baby during the treacherous sea journey between Malta and Gozo.
However, crucially, some stories posted by the page are far less removed from reality, making it difficult for casual readers to tell truth from fiction.
The page also sometimes posts stories that are, in fact, true and widely reported elsewhere. In recent days it has posted about Bad Bunny’s Grammy victory, a new pavilion erected to mark the government’s Vision 2050, and the reopening of the Jesuit Church in Valletta, among other things.
Other stories use local celebrities to drive up engagement, placing them in increasingly far-fetched situations.
In one post, former footballer Michael Mifsud funds life-saving surgery for a child. In another, actress Marama Corlett goes one further, paying for several people’s cancer treatment. And tenor Joseph Calleja regularly visits orphanages offering private mentorships and live recitals, according to another post.
What is Infinite Facts?
Facebook records show that the Infinite Facts page was first opened in 2022, initially going by the peculiar name ‘Beautiful lady,’ managed by Facebook users in the US and Pakistan.
The page appears to have lain dormant for years, before suddenly changing its name to ‘Explore Malta’ last April.
What followed was a deluge of tourist-trap photos, portraying sweeping vistas of Malta’s churches, skylines and ports.
In November, the page changed its name again, this time to ‘Infinite Facts,’ although it initially steered clear of any Malta-related content.
Instead, it began posting similar AI-generated content about countries all over the world, from Norwegian fishermen rescuing baby seals and nursing them back to health, to Dutch scientists perfecting a cloudbusting device enabling them to summon rain at will, akin to that immortalised by Kate Bush in the Wilhelm Reich-inspired 1985 song of the same name.
However, the page turned its eye back to Malta in the run-up to Christmas and has focused exclusively on Malta-related content ever since, quickly racking up a substantial following.
At the time of writing, the page has over 23,000 followers.
Why post AI slop in the first place?
On the face of things, there seems to be little rhyme or reason behind the content posted by Infinite Facts.
Unlike other AI-generated content frequently posted to Maltese social media, Infinite Facts’ posts do not try to scam readers out of their money. Nor is the content overtly political, seeking to push readers towards one position or another.
Instead, the page seems to be a textbook example of engagement farming, a tactic often used to artificially inflate a page’s metrics, particularly followers and likes, often using automated bots to churn out clickbait content.
This tactic is often used by scammers in a bait-and-switch scam, in which a social media post racks up thousands of likes and followers by posting content designed to elicit an emotional response, only to then replace the post with a scam investment at a later date, in the hope that its thousands of followers will give it a veneer of authenticity.
One example of this is the deluge of posts about injured dogs and abandoned children that hit Maltese Facebook groups in 2023.
However, some tech critics say much of AI slop content is driven not by scams, but simply by people seeking to exploit the peculiarities of Facebook’s algorithm.
In one substack post, journalist Max Read described how Facebook has come to be flooded by a wave of AI slop posted seemingly “with no clear purpose or point or context”. Much of this “is directly subsidized by Facebook itself, and created by relatively normal guys pushing weirdness as an engagement strategy,” he argued.
In practice, Read said, Facebook pages pushing AI slop earn income from Facebook’s performance bonus programme, which rewards pages for the reach, shares and comments their posts receive, effectively encouraging people to create viral content, regardless of how off-the-wall it may be.
Engagement farming
Whether this is also the case for Infinite Facts is unclear, however the page’s content contains several tell-tale signs of engagement farming.
For one thing, posts typically end with a question, encouraging readers to respond or react.
“How would you honor someone who turns their sorrow into everyday kindness?” one post, about a grieving widow cooking for her neighbours, asks.
“Who else do you know that silently shaped Malta’s heart like this worker did?” asks another post.
Likewise, the page’s administrators typically respond to comments with a question, egging them on to continue the conversation, even in the case of critical comments.
When one reader pointed out that a story about a wartime hero saving Valletta’s Triton Fountain cannot be true, given that the fountain was only built years after the war had ended, the page replied “You’re right to question that – the Triton Fountain in Valletta was officially inaugurated in 1959, but construction began a few years earlier, around 1955. Were you thinking about the exact timeline, or the sculptor’s involvement?”
Another comment accusing the page of sharing AI-driven content was met with “Haha, fair point. Some replies are AI-assisted to keep the conversation flowing, but all stories and images are based on real events in Malta. Have you ever seen something similar happen locally?”.
The page also has virtually no interaction with any other local channel, platform or page.
Of the five other Facebook page Infinite Facts follows, several post similar AI-generated or viral content to their over seven million followers. Meanwhile, others appear to be shell pages, devoid of content and waiting to be used for similar ruses.
Attempts to contact the Infinite Facts page administrators were unsuccessful. A Gmail address listed on the page appears to be inactive, returning a bounce-back message. Meanwhile, the administrators did not reply to questions sent through Facebook Messenger.
A Facebook page named Infinite Facts now has 23,000 followers.
Fact Check, Society, Technology
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Originally published here.
