Facebook Is Studying Your Feelings’ To Make Money & Manipulate Your Emotions?

Facebook Is Studying Your Feelings’ To Make Money & Manipulate Your Emotions?

We’ve known for years that our “Likes” on Facebook not only tell your friends what you saw but it also affects what you see. Along the same lines, “reactions” can further allow you to express how you feel about a link, photo, or video. While such data might be helpful for you or your friends, these recorded feelings by Facebook can also enable increased surveillance, potential profiling, targeted advertising, and emotional detection.


According to a recent report filtering online, it is claimed that leaked documents from Facebook suggest they are working on ways to show advertisements based on your emotions and feelings. In particular, the report focuses on how this technology could be used to target young people — teenagers as young as 14 — categorizing them based on their feelings.

For its part, Facebook has called this leaked story misleading, saying it does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state. They went on to say that these leaked documents in question is just research intended to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook.

Don’t forget back in 2014, Facebook’s controversial study exploring whether it could manipulate people’s moods by tweaking their news feeds to favor negative or positive content.


We don’t know precisely but researchers are saying we do know that this so-called “emotion detection” technology uses “sentiment analysis” techniques to analyze the words people use in their posts and assigns those words an emotional score.

The other big way Facebook is tracking our emotions is through the recent reaction buttons they now provide to us. The love, sad, and angry buttons  lets users tag those posts with basic emotional states. This way they get users to track their own emotional states. It’s not just Facebook. Many other social media sites do this same type of sentiment analysis, and emotion detection, to varying degrees.


There’s no reason to believe this type of emotion detection technology is only being used on teenagers – I would think it’s all of us. A lot of the focus on this story has been on the potential dangers to youth — the worry that children who are emotionally vulnerable might end up getting manipulated by a computer algorithm.


It’s easy to focus on the darker, more nefarious uses for this technology; how it might be used to influence or manipulate people in their most vulnerable moments. But over the years, I’ve interviewed a number of people who work on emotion-detecting technology, and there are lots of positive uses for this category of technology as well.

For instance, there have been a number of projects that analyze social media for signs of depression or other mental health issues. In that sense, emotion-detection and sentiment analysis can be used as a screening tool, or an early warning system.


To be fair, you may not want to hide your emotions from social networks. Your emotional data can be used to show you more relevant posts and more useful advertisements, and that can be a benefit.

If you do want to hide your emotions, there are tools out there that can help. For instance, there’s a plugin called “Go Rando” that you can install in your web browser. As the name suggests, it randomizes your Facebook reactions. The idea is if you can’t stop a social network from trying to detect your emotions, you can at least try to confuse it.

But for most people, I think the important piece here is simply knowing this is happening. And, according to all the experts I’ve talked to, these technologies aren’t going away any time soon.

thedigitalteacher

 

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