Is the Ten Year Challenge a Facebook scam???

If you have an Instagram account, if you’re on Facebook or you if use Twitter, or any other social media, or read the news, own a phone or have eyes, you will probably have encountered the ten year challenge.

The challenge is the latest social media craze and it simply involves posting a contemporary photo of yourself alongside another from ten years ago. Ostensibly it’s about nostalgia and showing how much things have changed in the intervening years.

Like all good viral crazes, it’s visually interesting, conceptually simple, easy to do and replete with opportunities for poignancy, reflection, virtue signalling, celebrity humble bragging, commentary (…guilty!) and humour.

Here’s Star Trek Discovery and the Walking Dead’s Sonequa Martin-Green showing us how it’s done:

This meme du jour follows in the footsteps of other social media fripperies, such as the similarly self-descriptive Ice Bucket challenge and the No Makeup challenge.

Social media’s capacity to spawn viral crazes isn’t limited to challenges though. Older readers may remember becoming concerned for friends whose speech turned into incoherent jabbering about crop yields around the turn of the last decade, as they battled crippling Farmville addictions.

And surely nobody managed to escape the onslaught of quiz invitations promising to reveal what kind of animal/superhero/Disney princess/star wars character/boss/sandwich/weather system/plumbing accessory/microbe they were.

Of course we now know that the latter example, the pox of Facebook quizzes, turned out to be a giant data-gobbling bait and switch by Cambridge Analytica and its ilk. The scars from that scam are still fresh, and I suspect its those wounds that are behind the latest twist in the unfolding story of the ten year challenge: What if it’s a trap?

In the last few days, the chorus of enthusiasm for the ten year challenge has been joined by a low rumble of dissenting voices worried that it’s another scam.

A side-by-side comparison of the same person, separated by a fixed period of time is excellent fodder for training a facial recognition engine about ageing, the cynics muse.

Facial recognition of the kind used by Facebook relies on machine learning, a process that creates sophisticated computer programs through training by example. The more examples of accurately described data you have, the better.

Perhaps, they ponder, the challenge isn’t just some random outgrowth from Facebook’s planet-scale userbase, but some juicy bait to lure us into putting our heads into the maw of its facial recognition combobulator.