Revealed: The Many Evils Of Facebook.
In 2014, Facebook publicly admitted to manipulating the news feeds of almost 700,000 users without their knowledge. The goal? To measure whether it was possible to change people's emotional states simply by controlling the type of content that appeared on their screens.
For a week, some users received more negative posts, while others only saw positive messages. The result confirmed what was already suspected: people's moods were affected — and they began to post content with the same emotional charge that they were consuming.
This experiment, conducted in partnership with university researchers, revealed something frightening: social networks have the power to manipulate emotions en masse in a silent, almost invisible way — and all this without the need for violence, just with algorithms.
The question that remains is: if they did this in a "scientific" test, what else has been tested in silence? And how many decisions that we think are ours were actually induced by invisible lines of code?
[graphic & text courtesy of Revellati Online]
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Related content:
A study entitled, "The Effect Of Deactivating Facebook And Instagram On Users' Emotional State" has just been released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The study says there "is an active debate over how social media affect users’ psychological well-being. Do social media make people happier, for example by facilitating beneficial social connections? Or do they make people depressed and anxious, for example by reducing face-to-face interactions or increasing unfavorable social comparisons? Some analysts argue that social media have contributed to the alarming recent decline in young people’s mental health." The study concludes, "Our estimates suggest that deactivating Facebook or Instagram improved people’s emotional state."
If being experimented on isn't enough and you aren't worried about Facebook affecting your mental state, here's another reason to break your social media addiction: privacy. A new article has been published on Tuta.com entitled, "All The Data Facebook Collects - And How To Stop This". The article goes into a fair amount of detail on how Facebook tags and tracks your behavior, but here's an overview:
What data does Facebook collect and track?
- All your profile information
- Any actions you've performed on the platform
- How you engage with content
- Your political preferences
- Your device's data
- All your browsing data
- Your current and past locations
- Your purchasing habits online and in stores
Most people have no idea that posting a favorite cookie recipe on Facebook opens them up to this kind of surveillance. It's probably revealed somewhere deep in a user agreement written by a highly paid attorney, but few people read those agreements in their entirety, and companies like Meta (Facebook's corporate name) take full advantage of it.
Unfortunately the only way back to safety is to delete your Facebook account, and most likely the accounts of any other Meta products you use, such as Instagram and WhatsApp. If that's a bridge too far for you, Tuta.com has another guide you might find useful: "How To Make Your Facebook Private: Yes, It Is Possible".
Isn't it time you take back your life from the soulless tech companies that play with your emotions and harvest your personal data for profit?
