Via Reddit: The allegation was revealed this morning by The Australian which obtained internal documents from the social media giant which reportedly show how Facebook can exploit the moods and insecurities of teenagers using the platform for the potential benefit of advertisers.
The confidential document dated this year detailed how by monitoring posts, comments and interactions on the site, Facebook can figure out when people as young as 14 feel “defeated”, “overwhelmed”, “stressed”, “anxious”, “nervous”, “stupid”, “silly”, “useless”, and a “failure”.
Such information gathered through a system dubbed sentiment analysis could be used by advertisers to target young Facebook users when they are potentially more vulnerable.
While Google is the king of the online advertising world, Facebook is the other major player which dominates the industry worth about $80 billion last year.
But Facebook is not one to rest on its laurels. The leaked document shows it has been honing the covert tools its uses to gain useful psychological insights on young Australian and New Zealanders in high school and tertiary education.
The confidential document dated this year detailed how by monitoring posts, comments and interactions on the site, Facebook can figure out when people as young as 14 feel “defeated”, “overwhelmed”, “stressed”, “anxious”, “nervous”, “stupid”, “silly”, “useless”, and a “failure”.
Such information gathered through a system dubbed sentiment analysis could be used by advertisers to target young Facebook users when they are potentially more vulnerable.
While Google is the king of the online advertising world, Facebook is the other major player which dominates the industry worth about $80 billion last year.
But Facebook is not one to rest on its laurels. The leaked document shows it has been honing the covert tools its uses to gain useful psychological insights on young Australian and New Zealanders in high school and tertiary education.
(Link to more)
2 comments:
Not exactly a surprise.
Anybody who spent any time on it saw how needy a lot of their people - not just yoots - were.
This isn't shocking in any meaningful way since social media sites monetize their product by the amount of eyeballs/brains they can insidiously worm their way into to generate that constant revenue. Exploitation of the weak and vulnerable? We can monetize that? Live feeds of suicides and murders? We can monetize that. Oh sure, they will publically denounce all of this, but once the cameras are turned off and the nationally collective low hanging fruit consumer forgets it in a haze of chemicals or some other distraction, they will go back to business as usual.
This is mainly about control. Control of you and your mind. That is the real war. People have allowed, with joy and glee, the devices into their lives that they believe make their lives easier to handle, but have infiltrated their privacy and their lives in a way never seen before. This is a new experiment to see who the masters of the mind will be and I'm telling you, government hates competition.
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