Orwellian: Facebook Users’ Political Sentiments & Private Messages Now Analyzed by Facebook & Politico
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on January 17, 2012
Facebook users, if you haven’t read George Orwell’s futuristic novel 1984, now may be a good time.
While this data mining of Facebook and sharing with Politico (why on earth Politico?) may seem innocuous at first glance, this is only the beginning. And no permission by users has to be granted.
Have no expectations of privacy in this brave new world…
Reported by All Things D, Facebook Gives Politico Deep Access to Users’ Political Sentiments:
A partnership between Facebook and Politico announced today is one of the more far-reaching efforts. It will consist of sentiment analysis reports and voting-age user surveys, accompanied by stories by Politico reporters.
Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will include Facebook users’ private status messages and comments. While that may alarm some people, Facebook and Politico say the entire process is automated and no Facebook employees read the posts.
Rather, every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.
From Web Pro News, Facebook Will Share Your Data – Including Private Messages – With Politico:
Facebook announced last week that they will be mining your posts and messages for your thoughts on the GOP presidential candidates, and they will share that info with Politico.
From that announcement:
“Facebook will compile mentions of the candidates in U.S. users’ posts and comments as well as assess positive and negative sentiments expressed about them. Facebook’s data team will use automated software tools frequently used by researchers to infer sentiment from text.”
From Editors Web Log, Politico and Facebook team up to use data for political journalism:
As the Republican primaries heat up in the US, news organizations everywhere are trying to predict the winner. But while none of them have a crystal ball, Politico does have a new source of knowledge at its disposal: Facebook.
Last Thursday Politico and Facebook announced they were partnering up to measure user opinion of Republican candidates. A Facebook data team is using an automated process to measure how often users are mentioning, sharing and linking to GOP candidates and whether these mentions are positive or negative. The results are handed onto Politico, whose journalists analyse and publish them. The first set of data is already out.
The day could come that none of has to vote — the thought police and other “powers that be” at Facebook could merely evaluate and tabulate our intentions based off private messages to friends. Chilling possibility.
About the author
OMG – this is becoming more scarier every day. It’s like the Matrix or something with more privacy being invaded.