With those comment counts, something dodgy is obviously happening.
The interesting question here is whether Facebook is somehow accidentally amplifying it. Certainly it is not in Facebook's interest to allow this kind of data harvesting. If it hurts you to think that Facebook somehow isn't maximally evil, at least consider that this is data that could be only Facebook's. Allowing somebody else to harvest it is money straight out of Facebook's pocket.
So, given FB should not be complicit, what mistake could they be making to allow the system to be haunted? The obvious guess is that they have a feedback loop in the ranking algorithm. It values comments very highly as a signal of good engagement, but they weren't prepared for "content" that is this good at eliciting low effort comments and have wide appeal demographically. As long as one of these reaches a critical mass, it'll be shown to tens or hundreds of millions of people just by any engagement feeding even more engagement.
The interesting question here is whether Facebook is somehow accidentally amplifying it. Certainly it is not in Facebook's interest to allow this kind of data harvesting. If it hurts you to think that Facebook somehow isn't maximally evil, at least consider that this is data that could be only Facebook's. Allowing somebody else to harvest it is money straight out of Facebook's pocket.
So, given FB should not be complicit, what mistake could they be making to allow the system to be haunted? The obvious guess is that they have a feedback loop in the ranking algorithm. It values comments very highly as a signal of good engagement, but they weren't prepared for "content" that is this good at eliciting low effort comments and have wide appeal demographically. As long as one of these reaches a critical mass, it'll be shown to tens or hundreds of millions of people just by any engagement feeding even more engagement.
Is there anything less obvious?