MIT’s Technology Review reports that Facebook has amassed “the most extensive data set ever assembled on human social behavior,” that includes private conversations, family photos, records of trips, births, marriages, and deaths.
The social network also has personal profiles, “Likes” they have chosen, and in certain apps and websites the songs listened to or articles they read. To give you an idea of the scale, Facebook cataloged some 5 billion songs listened to in only five months.
Facebook’s Data Science Team is charged with analyzing all this information to advance both the business and social science generally. They research how people behave so they can influence them to the benefit of their advertisers.
“Our goal is not to change the pattern of communication in society,” explains Cameron Marlow, Facebook Data Science Team. “Our goal is to understand it so we can adapt our platform to give people the experience that they want.”
For example, last year Facebook found that rather than the six degrees of separation we have from one another, among its then 721 million people only four intermediate connections were needed. They have built a “gross national happiness” index by measuring words and phrases that signal positive or negative emotion. They are looking at why some ideas and fashions spread and others do not.
“In April, influenced in part by conversations over dinner with his med-student girlfriend (now his wife), Zuckerberg decided that he should use social influence within Facebook to increase organ donor registrations,” notes the article. “Users were given an opportunity to click a box on their Timeline pages to signal that they were registered donors, which triggered a notification to their friends. The new feature started a cascade of social pressure, and organ donor enrollment increased by a factor of 23 across 44 states.”
MIT’s Technology Review reports that Facebook has amassed “the most extensive data set ever assembled on human social behavior,” that includes private conversations, family photos, records of trips, births, marriages, and deaths.
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