Facebook Likes

Surveillance Series

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, 2019, Excerpts

In 2013 a provocative study by Kosinski, Stillwell, and Microsoft’s Thore Graepel revealed that Facebook “likes” could automatically and accurately estimate a wide range of personal attributes that people would typically assume to be private, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.

The fundamental purpose of most people at Facebook working on data is to influence and alter people’s moods and behavior. They are doing it all the time to make you like stories more, to click on more ads, to spend more time on the site. The “personal relevancy” score scans and collects everything posted in the past week by each of your friends, everyone you follow, each group you belong to, and every Facebook page you’ve liked.

Experiments are run on every user at some point in their tenure on the site. Whether that is seeing different size ad copy, or different marketing messages, or different call-to-action buttons, or having their feeds generated by different ranking algorithms.

Facebook is aimed at solving one problem: how and when to intervene in the state of play that is your daily life in order to modify your behavior and thus sharply increase the predictability of your actions now, soon, and later. Facebook owns an unprecedented means of behavior modification that operates covertly and in the absence of social or legal mechanisms of agreement, contest, and control.