Facebook , with its 900 million users , is a social scientist ’s wet dreaming : a huge number of participant , all offering up rich flow of personal selective information . patently that has n’t escaped Facebook ’s attention , which is why it has its own squad of societal scientists analyzing all of our data — and , on affair , experimenting with us too .
Technology Review has takenan in - profundity lookat the Data Science Team , which is led by Cameron Marlow . He head up a chemical group of 12 researchers , who apply mathematics , programing skills , and societal scientific discipline to mine passably much all of Facebook ’s data . Recently , however , the team has started not just analyzing data , but run experiments on the site . engineering Review explain :
“ lately the Data Science Team has begun to use its unique status to experiment with the mode Facebook work , fine-tune the site - the way scientists might prod an ant ’s nest - to see how users respond … So [ Eytan Bakshy ] mess up with how Facebook operated for a quarter of a billion users . Over a seven - calendar week point , the 76 million contact that those users portion out with each other were logged . Then , on 219 million randomly select occasions , Facebook prevented someone from seeing a liaison shared by a friend . Hiding link this direction created a control group so that Bakshy could assess how often people end up promoting the same links because they have similar information source and interests .
“ He find that our close friends strongly rock which info we share , but overall their impact is dwarfed by the collective influence of numerous more distant contacts - what sociologists call “ weak ties . ” It is our various collection of weak ties that most powerfully determines what info we ’re exposed to . ”
But if that sounds a lilliputian creepy , it should n’t . Well , not too creepy-crawly , because these form of experiments are n’t designed to influence us , but rather empathize us . The piece continues :
“ Marlow say his squad wants to divine the rules of on-line social life to understand what ’s going on inside Facebook , not to acquire ways to manipulate it . “ Our finish is not to alter the pattern of communication in society , ” he says . “ Our end is to understand it so we can conform our platform to give people the experience that they want . ” But some of his squad ’s work and the posture of Facebook ’s leaders show that the companionship is not above using its platform to pick off user ’ deportment . Unlike donnish social scientists , Facebook ’s employee have a short course from an thought to an experimentation on 100 of millions of people . ”
No doubt those possibilities make Facebook an attractive proposition for many coming societal scientist — which is perhaps why Marlow ’s squad is look to double in size of it over the next few calendar month . That will imply more experiment , more insight and , hopefully , a better understanding of how we all interact . Which is a beneficial affair ! I just hope you do n’t mind being a participant — because you do n’t have much choice . [ Technology Review ]
Image byKsayer1under Creative Commons license
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