Leaks reveal Facebook planning to target emotionally vulnerable and insecure youth

CoolHandBandit wrote: »

What's that? Justin Bebo do you mean?

Never mind, feeling a bit long in the tooth.

Boom_Bap wrote: »

An apparent IM conversation from 15 years ago. This is soooooo legit.

where is the mention of a 15 year old IM conversation?

osarusan wrote: »

In the second link provided in the OP.

didnt spot the second link. cheers.

pilly wrote: »

Don't think for one minute OP that Boards is not using the same marketing tools. I for one get targeted ads popping up.

Subscribers can turn the ads off.

Anything that is free is using your browsing history to sell stuff to you.

Biggest lickspittle on boardz wrote: »

http://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/leaked-document-reveals-facebook-conducted-research-to-target-emotionally-vulnerable-and-insecure-youth/news-story/d256f850be6b1c8a21aec6e32dae16fd

After the revelations that Zuckerberg personally called user who trust Facebook 'dumb fucks', you would really have to start questioning just what Facebook is doing at this point. It is no longer a social media tool, but more of a social engineering and mass surveillance programme at this point.

Are you still sharing your entire life on Facebook, or have you started to become more cautious in light of recent events?

This isn't even the first or second time they've been caught at such hi-jinks:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-apologises-psychological-experiments-on-users

"Facebook’s second most powerful executive, Sheryl Sandberg, has apologised for the conduct of secret psychological tests on nearly 700,000 users in 2012, which prompted outrage from users and experts alike.
The experiment, revealed by a scientific paper published in the March issue of Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, hid "a small percentage" of emotional words from peoples' news feeds, without their knowledge, to test what effect that had on the statuses or "likes" that they then posted or reacted to."

Facebook seem very interested in manipulating the mood, attitude and political views of it's users. Which is no surprise when the rumor is that Zuckerberg intends to run for President.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/zuckerberg-2020/513689/

And if Zuckerberg is indeed laying the groundwork for a possible run for office, the role of Facebook during such a race raises several huge questions. Facebook is a dominant force in the flow of news and information, and its engineers can—with the tweak of an algorithm—grab the attention of its users on a massive scale. Facebook can even toy with its users emotions, as skew an election, and that’s before considering how much personal data it has on the American people: Facebook, in the hands of a political operative, would put ordinary voter rolls to shame.

As mad as that sounds, it was a significant plot line in 'House of Cards' where a candidate used influence with a big data company to manipulate search results to deliver people a favourable opinion of him, and it's not as far fetched as you might think. Both Obama and Trump benefited from on line grass roots campaigns that eschewed traditional campaigning and instead targeted marginalised demographics and on line opinion shapers.


Facebook has been at the fore front also in developing algorithims to 'combat fake news', you have to wonder what other uses they could be applied to?

Zuckerberg even published a rather creepy globalist manifesto outlining his 'vision':

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/16/mark-zuckerberg-new-facebook-manifesto-letter

Facebook is a monster, you could reveal a story about how they are behind a spate of child abductions and it would be all brushed under the carpet within a few days.

seamus wrote: »

The wording in the article is interesting.

It claims that Facebook is doing <insert activity here>.

And then posits that activity could be used to <insert exploitative activity here>.

If you read it carefully, they're not claiming that facebook are actually doing this analysis for the purposes of directed advertising;

"Can exploit", not "do exploit".
"Could be used", not "is used".

The report then goes on to reveal that in fact the practices may not be quite as immoral and predatory as they initially suggested;

In other words, they're apparently analysing trends across young people and then using that for targetting advertisements.

So it's not "Hey John, I notice you're feeling down. Do you want a case of beer and a box of tissues today?", but rather during the week it's "buy these new clothes and look great", and at the weekend, "Come down to club 92 and have a great night out!".

And I expect that they do this analysis across all demographics and age groups. It's just more fun and sensationalist when you can say, "Facebook are targetting your depressed daughter with ads for slimming pills!"

Facebook actually has been talking in recent weeks about a sentiment analysis system to try and spot individuals who may be at risk of self-harm or suicide.

That reads like facebook spin to be honest, they were also forced to admit the analytics could be used for more nefarious purposes and were now 'working to ensure (after a backlash) that they couldn't.
Then not one paragraph later they are indulging in sentiment analysis on individuals, in this case to spot suicidal ideation.
Now on the face of it you can argue that's a good thing. But what else are they looking at, and should we have some micromanaging big brother looking over our shoulder at our every thought? Should facebook start messaging your friends, your relatives and employers to warn them of this? Is all agency to be removed from human action least we harm ourselves?

Facebook is not my parent, nor did I invite it to be so.

Ahhh Social Media, the lowest form of communication that only served to turn a generation of people into snowflakes!

Honestly I can see there's good intention behind it trying to help people feeling depressed from getting worse but social media is something I just wont use. Posting on a board is the most I will ever go, wont use the likes of twitter or facebook as it was always a stupid thing to me imo.