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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• A strange Facebook glitch is adding words to shared posts.
• The added phrases are often Gen Z slang.
• Meta says it is investigating.

Have you seen Facebook add text that you didn’t write to a shared post? You’re not alone, as a strange glitch has popped up.

Several weeks ago, Facebook users started reporting that when they shared a post, it would appear with extra words, as if the poster added them. What’s most odd is that the added text is often Gen Z slang. I’ve seen examples like, “Massive W,” “We are totally feasting, bestie,” “That design is so cooked!” and “Views are fire!”. 

These phrases appear on posts where the text doesn’t even make sense — and from posters who are decidedly not Gen Z.

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I haven’t seen an example of glitch text overwriting text, so it only seems to show up if you share with no comment of your own.

I first noticed the issue when a friend shared a marketplace listing for a camera. The post was shared, but it appeared with additional text: “We truly are living in the year 3000.” I thought the extra part was strange, but figured it was my friend complimenting the camera somehow. Shortly after, though, he followed with a post asking why text appeared that he hadn’t written.

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I’m a reasonably tech-savvy person, but I didn’t have an answer, so I searched for an explanation to give him. I didn’t find a potential cause, but I did find this is apparently a widespread issue over the past few weeks. I found multiple Reddit posts, a Facebook post from a Georgia news anchor, and plenty of other social media comments complaining about the added Gen Z flair.

What’s causing the Facebook Gen Z glitch?

I reached out to Meta to ask about what’s going on, and I got a response from the Facebook communications team that it was looking into the issue with “AI captions.” I didn’t use the word AI in my question, so it seems like Meta is initially placing the blame on AI. The representative did say it would reach back out once it knew more, and I’ll update here with that response.

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There is a setting related to AI-generated titles on your posts, but I’m not certain it would help here. Meta says this feature is to “help people understand what your post is about when they see it in search results” and that these AI-generated titles will have an attribution that it is AI. My friend deleted the “year 3000” post on their camera listing, but on another shared post where the unintended text still remains, no attribution appears.

For now, there doesn’t seem to be a fix. 

You can go back and manually delete the text if you see it show up, but since the text doesn’t show up until after the fact, there’s no way to know before if it’s going to happen. The best thing to do is to check your profile after you share something.