No, it gives you what's trending for the categories you're into. I like biking. What kind of biking content does get the most likes and is therefore suggested on Instagram? Woman in tight clothes with unzipped tops. I'm into skiing, what kind of content do I get? Girls skiing in bikinis. I'm following some coaches for a sport I participate in, what kind of content do I get? Girls in yoga pants doing exercises at the gym.
For every category, there will be someone doing a sexualized version of it. Those get lots of eyeballs and likes, and hence get boosted into suggestions for that category. And it's not like I get every post like that. But often enough that I no longer scroll in public for fear of what NSFW things will show up.
But this reminded me of another thing once popping up in my feed: my own private pictures.
I first got a bit shocked. Did I accidentally post these to Facebook?? But no, it was just a suggestion from Facebook, "share these photos". But I was on the bus, I didn't expect these photos to suddenly be on my screen for those around me to see (pictures of a medical condition). And it creeped me out that Facebook was looking through my phone's gallery when I'm not explicitly doing it to upload an image.
I ended up blocking file access for Facebook. Which now makes it impossible for me to post pictures. Which in turn of course means I barely post anymore. Great thinking, PMs.
I find it obnoxious that Facebook doesn't use the default system file picker (which doesn't require filesystem access permissions to use).
With other apps I can easily select photos even if they aren't locally available on my device. With Facebook I need to manually download the files from Google Photos, paste them into a local device folder, and only then will they actually show up in Facebook's weird, poorly-designed photo picker UI. Not exactly the best user experience.
Yeah, the same with Messenger. Want to send someone a photo from last year? Good luck scrolling through their clunky interface a thousand pictures back, vs just using the jump-to-month in my native gallery app.
This kind of content used to never show up on my Instagram feed but one day I tapped a few too many profiles deep and now I have the same issue. Pure trash
For every category, there will be someone doing a sexualized version of it. Those get lots of eyeballs and likes, and hence get boosted into suggestions for that category. And it's not like I get every post like that. But often enough that I no longer scroll in public for fear of what NSFW things will show up.