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Facebook Knows Your Political Preferences (businessinsider.com)
Facebook knows a lot more about its users than they think. For instance, the New York Times reports, the company is categorizing its users as liberal, conservative, or moderate. These details are valuable for advertisers and campaign managers, especially ahead of the election season. From a BusinessInsider report: For some, Facebook is able to come to conclusions about your political leanings easily, if you mention a political party on your page. For those that are less open about politics on social media, Facebook makes assumptions based on pages you like. As The New York Times explained, if you like Ben and Jerry's Facebook page and most of the other people that like that page identify as liberal, Facebook might assume you too are liberal.
Probably because you keep posting and sharing political garbage all day long
No they don't. They don't even recognise the spaghetti monster as a political party :(.
Among many other reasons.
-Anonymous Coward
I wonder how much Facebook knows... about it's non-Users.
I'm a fiscally conservative, social moderate who hates Obama, has multiple openly gay friends, and generally votes libertarian when possible. Good luck categorizing that! Maybe that's why I usually just see ads for "Women get it free" on the rare occasion that I'm on the site.
Considering that probably 50% of the stuff I post on my timeline is politicians behaving badly (either party) or stupidly (lately, heavily Republican, but let's be fair, most of that is Trump), and another fair chunk of stuff I post is pro-LGBTQ, I would honestly be more surprised if Facebook couldn't figure out I was liberal.
I mean, we're not exactly talking a tough determination in my case.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Facebook THINKS it Knows Your Political Preferences , i can promise you it is getting it wrong for my preference.
It's not a secret. I don't run around with Trump/Pence bumper stickers on my car, but I'm happy to discuss politics and how to make America great again with anyone that wants to have a civil discussion about it. If it's important to you that your political bent be a closely guarded secret, perhaps running around liking everything on FB isn't something you should be doing to start with.
story. I very much want to know this too. I don't have a Facebook account but all family and whatnot do. I try to get my g/f to not post pictures and things of me but she does it anyway. I would love to see the profile they have of me (and what recourse there is for its removal). I have no doubt that there is one.
Facebook makes it easy to publish negative ads (voter suppression) to opponent voters and fear-mongering ads (vote encouragement) to friendly voters!
Of course Google does the same but more ubiquitously.
These days, your political preference is easier to tell than your gender. That's not even factoring into account that they seem to categorize politics into three buckets and gender into over 70.
1/
since i have not used or logged in to my facebook account,(which is in my real but very common name that many others share) after initial signing up, and since i have variety of tracking blockers which do block facebook trackers in other websites, they have no data.
only people trapped in facebook's walled garden can think it is all that powerful.
more difficult to avoid the reach of that other ad pusher google.
2/
they are way too confident in their algorithms that categorize users. i have seen enough wrong headed google ads/recommendations/etc to know that they have a wrong idea about my preferences on many things.
As you can see in the comments, Facebook will get right most of the political preferences, but not from the slashdot users. They're too special, unique snowflakes!
It's not like they try and hide that they're doing this (at least for me): if I don't use incognito mode, then go on any site even a little political or controversial that has facebook's trackers, I get flooded with suggestions related to whatever leanings that site has.
After Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, it will be easier to round'em up.
And they know who your friends are, and what times you'll online and what games you play the most. They even know what you look like!
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
I'd like to see what they say about me. I bash both parties all the time. My comments on every subject are usually sarcastic. Do they have a working sarcasm detector? Or is it all about the things you follow? George Takei is a gay rights activist. So would a conservative who likes ice cream (ben and jerrys) and George Takei be labeled liberal?
Or is someone who is far-left who attacks Hillary going to be labeled conservative for being anti-Democrat?
I've seen those types of labels applied. They never work. I got rejected from a minimum wage job in college because the chain store had a standard questionaire. If you answered that you don't use drugs, but think they should be legal, you were considered a lying drug user. The makers of the test couldn't conceive of someone who thinks drugs should be legal and regulated, and wouldn't use them if they were. Though, this was 20+ years ago, so the modern legalization swing wasn't popular yet.
I can only think that the labels are wrong much of the time, and the effectiveness of them is over-stated to increase Facebook's ad income.
Learn to love Alaska
You think the big swastika tattooed on my neck gave Facebook a hint as to my political affiliation? I don't think they could see the "88" on the back of my hand in my profile picture, so it couldn't have been that.
And by the way, it's not really a swastika, it's a ancient Hindu good luck symbol, you dumb jew.
Facebook=CIA organisation funded with CIA money to spy on innocent users
Since I'm not a fool who still uses Failbook, Failbook knows NOTHING about me whatsoever. Why are you still using Facebook? Or are you so into BDSM that you want Facebook to be your Master? You all read the same news stories about Facebook that everyone else does; don't you think it's wise to at least start formulating your exit strategy from Facebook? Get smart and plan on leaving it today. You'll be glad you did afterwards.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I try to get my g/f to not post pictures and things of me but she does it anyway.
Not respecting your request for privacy is a ditch reason.
Seriously, I cannot see how any relationship can last without trust and respecting each other's wishes. Even when not deemed important. Especially when not deemed important.
People can generally guess a lot about you, based on things you say and do. No fancypants machine learning necessary.
So, liberals like to pay premium prices for mediocre frozen desserts?
sig: sauer
are they going to send their geeks to your house to take away your precious guns because you like the redstatewatcher.com page? or any other right wing rag on the internet?
but if the whole shadow profile thing is real as so many think, then they know me as an independent conservative. Not a Republican by any stretch. The Republicans stopped being "conservative" 40+ years ago. The last decent conservative was Eisenhower. The rest are RINOs -- in bed with big business, Wall Street, you name it.
There is a "Political Views" field available for you to set in your profile. Nothing sinister going on if you specify "Very Liberal" and Facebook therefore knows you're probably pretty liberal.
Imagine all the people...
Guessing and assuming should really give them a solid data set.
They see everything everyone posts or sends via message. If you ask the correct 3 or 4 questions to nearly every single person you'd find their political leanings as well.
What is your stance on abortion?
What are your views on religion?
What do you think about immigration?
LGTBQ?
That will be 80% of the population lumped into their respect non-critical thinking camps. One camp of open minded people who are mostly welcoming and accept that people are different and one that don't like people who think differently than they do.
I'm a fiscally conservative, social moderate who hates Obama, has multiple openly gay friends, and generally votes libertarian when possible. Good luck categorizing that!
It is possible to predict political preferences beyond looking at what you say about some of the defining issues. Your biology has been shown to be linked to your affiliations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Also this study http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
And then there is what you eat. http://www.livescience.com/143...
Or how smart you are. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci...
Having said that, in the end, they are probably just counting how many Trump photos have been posted by the account.
I have a FB account, but I rarely use it. I certainly don't talk politics on it, nor do I click on the dumb crap, political or otherwise, that pops up on it.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
the boating spaghetti monster party will promise new pool noodles for all new memebers
Sure, summer's almost over on the top half of the globe, but it's still warm enough for a good pool party, even if it does get political.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
>"Facebook knows a lot more about its users than they think. For instance, the New York Times reports, the company is categorizing its users as liberal, conservative, or moderate. "
First, it doesn't know more than I think... but, then, I am not a user.
In any case, the political spectrum is not a single scale of left and right. Never has been. That is a gross over-simplification of how things actually are. "Conservative" and "Liberal" mean absolutely nothing out of context. You can be conservative economically and liberal socially, for example.
See this for interesting information and a test: https://www.politicalcompass.o...
my g/f
Oh boo hoo hoo. You insensitive clod.
You're just jealous.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I'm no special snowflake, but FB ads are so off target it's laughable.
I seriously have never seen an astroturf campaign so far gone for a candidate as for Hillary. It actually doesn't matter what your political preferences are, just that they shove as much pro-Hillary shit into your feed. They honestly believe they can influence people's preferences by bashing or censoring all of the other candidates, and I do actually mean Gary Johnson and Jill Stein here more than the obvious bashing of Trump since Johnson and Stein are a million times more honest than the two front-runners.
People need to realize that Facebook (or Twitter, or any other social or non-social media) is not a news source any more, but a reflection of the political will of those who own it. My greatest concern is that so many people are too ignorant to realize it because of the funny pictures and friends' photos in their feed.
How else would they figure out how efficiently and effectively suppress conservative content while retaining SOCJUS adherents?
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
As The New York Times explained, if you like Ben and Jerry's Facebook page and most of the other people that like that page identify as liberal, Facebook might assume you too are liberal.
Perhaps you all should just assume we all like ice cream.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Then why do they keep serving me Donald J Trump ads?
I would sooner eat my own foot than vote for that orange monkey. If facebook "knows" so much, you'd think they would have figured that out.
"Assume" is not the same as "know".
Facebook is categorising the vast majority as liberal.
There is one country, however, where the mix is more evenly distributed. I'll give you a hint as to which country that is: to them, the world also includes the Toronto Bluejays.
All the pro-hillary stuff in my feed gets there because a specific person shares it. He's toned it down. I wasn't the only person to tell him to be more selective, or I'd mute him.
Learn to love Alaska
They got me dead wrong on a lot of things on the Ad preferences page.
Google on the other hand, is much better at this and I find using their stuff to be much less intrusive somehow.
https://www.google.com/setting...
The GOP was FOUNDED by the people you call "religious nutjobs" who were opposed to the immorality of slavery. Slavery was not ended because of economics - and it was working for Democrat politicians at the time who got power in congress based on the number of slaves in their states. It was ended for the "whacko" reason that it was IMMORAL.
The GOP was hijacked by the "socially moderate, fiscally conservative" idiots during and after WWII (when socially moderate had nothing to do with gays or abortion in EITHER party). In the 1970s the religious elements of the GOP arose again, largely over the Supreme Court abortion ruling. Post-Reagan, the elder Bush filled the top ranks of the GOP with his Wall Street and globalist crony friends who have become the GOP "establishment" that is so hated by the party base.
In just what delusional way do you think the GOP of today is "nothing like" the party in the '80s?
It's actually moved far to the left on social matters. In the 1980s the GOP (and the Democrats) were opposed to gay marriage and gays serving in the military. Today many Republicans accept both. In the 1980s the GOP was opposed to abortion- same today. In the 1980s the GOP was for a strong military - today the military is (depending on the function) only 20% to 70% as powerful. In the 1980s the GOP was for smaller government, but the Dems held congress so government did not shrink. In Bush years, the GOP establisment turned its back on this and created entire new agencies and grew the government like Democrats - hardly a move to the right. The big split in the GOP today is between the Bush-era establishment who are big-government globalists, and the base of the party who are not globalaists and still want small government. The platform of 2016 is not significantly different from the platform of 1980, and the party base has not changed at all.
People who insist the GOP has been hijacked and dragged to the right since the 1980s are either non-Republican who do not know what they are talking about (usually young liberals brainwashed by liberal teachers), Democrats who have moved very far left and are distressed that the GOP has not kept up with them in their leftward move, or establishment GOP figures (often former Democrats) who are dissapointed they have not been able to push the GOP left as fast as they wanted to.
If only 3 choices, then FB has 33% probablility of being correct. Probably higher than that since a lot of people think they are something they are not.
I'm liberal, but you're way of thinking is wrong!
I'm conservative, but judges need to change the law!
I'm moderate, but support life sentence for jay walking!
What is the difference anyway between a liberal, conservative, or moderate if they all want to take my money or tell me what to do?
who categorizes the categorizers?
Facebook is run by a left-leaning guy, and staffed by left-leaning people. Their perceptions of "liberal", "moderate", and "conservative" are by definition compromised. It's likely that anything to the right of Che or Mao is "conservative" to them. The mirror-image of this would be somebody like Ted Cruz running a site and categorizing everybody's politics. The scheme would be obviously biased. The facebook team is almost certainly to the left of the New York Times, who are themselves self-selected occupants of a leftist political bubble who are incapable of honest political analysis.
It's the classic problem of the biases of the people doing the categorizing/watching/analyzing/reporting
That said, I cannot understand why anybody with more than a dozen functional brain cells uses Facebook, and I have no interest in hiring anybody foolish enough to be using it.
Even *I* don't know my own political preference.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
In other circles, this is called guilt by association and it's notoriously flawed. Just because you know some people who are into something, it doesn't mean you're into it too. Just imagine how many parole officers would be criminals if this were the case. The other thing is, they're more than likely calculating averages so, for example, people who read the NYT also vote Democrat... ...on average. That doesn't tell you about individuals, it only gives you a probability about large groups of people in which there are ranges of probability and many outliers. There's nowt stranger than folk, as they say. This is nothing new, FB are just repeating the same old tired mistakes of the past with newer technology.
Riiight, Facebook? Another video from ya about Princeton disappearing in 2021? Masters of data science you employ?
In Japan, The Twitter Has Been Popular Rather Than The Facebook.
I block all their "suggested" crap and block the ads anyway.
Mine is not correct. I don't post anything politically related because my job is better served remaining apolitical. However, it's obvious that Facebook guessed based on my friends and area of the country.
Regardless of how many news stories, ads, or posts I tell it to hide, FB remains clueless about my tastes. It will suggest I join groups I just left, buy products I just bought, recommend befriending people I never heard of.
We have that in America too. Some politicians "hang tight" with people who think they are so close to God they might as well be a deity.
There's no naked women on FaceBook so knowing my sexual preference is worthless to them
I keep reading all these privacy issues regarding Windows 10, or Linux lovers saying move to Linux to avoid the privacy issue. Yet much of the privacy issues revolve around the web and sites like Facebook, Twitter, or running apps like Chrome. Your not solving much in privacy by running Linux and having a Facebook or Twitter account and accessing them with Chrome. Kind of defeats the purpose of running Linux. I've basically accepted the fact that being too obsessed with privacy and using devices is not healthy. Your going to loose privacy using the web and a device. No matter what OS you use, or what browser you choose. You want privacy pull the plug on internet and device use.
I'm open-minded and have friends and family with differing views on a number of different subjects. I think and vote by individual topic not by characterizing into a specific label. Facebook right now is extremely confused on what to show me. I see the following for recent ads
... maybe its not so confused.
- Donald Trump
- Hillary Clinton
- KY Jelly
Actually
Forget advertisers, this is a boon for academic political science and sociology research. Facebook has such massive data sets that there could be dozens or hundreds of unknown correlates of political preference, behavior, and decision making. Not to mention responses to outcomes and conditions.
I can't think of any University that wouldn't want to get its hands on this data. I hope Facebook makes it available to academia.
I just use it as a single point of log in for games. So really doubt they know for sure.
Of course they could assume based on my location, but that's not a highly accurate assessment.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
In Belgium I once used a site similar to http://www.istandwith.com/ but for Belgium. First I took the test and came to a conclusion that I was not voting for the correct party.So I took it more serious the next time with more finetuning. Took a fair bit of my time. About an hour or so.and again landed with that same party that I thought was the wrong one.Then I looked into the party I thought I should be voting for and I looked at what the computer told me I should be voting for and it seemed that the computer was right.
It was right about me and knew my political preference better than I did.
I know that the majority of people who take the test and land with a different conclusion will come up with why the computer was wrong and why they were right and find or make up excuses. It just prooves that voting is not so mutch a rational process, but more an emotional process.
I changed the party I should vote for instead of changing my point of view. Many people are not willing to do that and will stand with their party till they die, because that it how they think it should be.
This is at least true for everybody who I talked with about this. Remember that Belgium is a multy party system, where you can vote from almost extreme right up to comunism and eerything in between.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Because they annoy the crap out of me.
It actually doesn't have that field for me thus doesn't know my political leanings, oddly I intentionally keep quite about such things knowing the government might well monitor my facebook one day in the not too distant future. however it dose correctly identify me as a "Millennial" who lives in a "Housemate Based Household" with an interest in "Computing" and "Programming" That my OS preferences are "Android, Windows7 and Linux mint in that order" My preference in smartphone manufacturers And I work in "biology".
Whitch to be honest you might infer my political leanings from that alone :/
If I recall you can list it along with your relationship and employment status, I haven't logged into Facebook in like I year so I could be wrong.
I have a profile but post random bullshit that I don't even believe in, and make up stories about what happens to me and my made up family. I do post my real face photoshopped into pictures I scanned from unclaimed photos that were tossed in the garbage from a photo processing shop when they went out of business.
I'm curious to see if this somehow comes back to me in the future when I am "identified" by someone/some device.
It keeps giving me ads for far right parties even though I always vote left.
Moderate is NOT a word to use to describe my political views. Nor is conservative. Nor is liberal...
I'm most closely a "Communist Libertarian"....and am an odd hodgepodge. I passionately supported Bernie Sanders, but vehemently oppose Hillary Clinton. I'm pro-gun, and would rather see a national healthcare program than this horrendous mess. I think Trump's tax plan is much better than HRC. I support Black Lives Matter. I'm just a mess politically.
Guess... I'm just a bloody American!
Why do people in insist on thinking that "Liberal" and "Conservative" are opposites?
When did people stop understanding what those two words actually mean?