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posted by on Wednesday May 03 2017, @07:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the buy-now! dept.

News Corp's news.com.au reports on an internal document leaked from Facebook:

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.

Facebook has apologised and says it will investigate.

The story originally appeared in News Corp's The Australian, where it is pay-walled.

Additional coverage:


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday May 03 2017, @07:49PM (3 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday May 03 2017, @07:49PM (#503892)

    Also part of the business model: apologize for unpleasant behavior, promise to investigate, run script to rename.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 03 2017, @07:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 03 2017, @07:52PM (#503895)

    , and fire the intern who ran the script.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday May 03 2017, @07:57PM (1 child)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Wednesday May 03 2017, @07:57PM (#503898) Homepage

    Relevant Supporting Article. [theguardian.com]

    The highlights:

    " If the intention of Facebook’s public relations spin is to give the impression that such targeting is not even possible on their platform, I’m here to tell you I believe they’re lying through their teeth...

    ...Facebook deploys a political advertising sales team, specialized by political party, and charged with convincing deep-pocketed politicians that they do have the kind of influence needed to alter the outcome of elections...

    ...I’ll illustrate with an anecdote from my Facebook days. Someone on the data science team had cooked up a new tool that recommended Facebook Pages users should like. And what did this tool start spitting out? Every ethnic stereotype you can imagine. We killed the tool when it recommended then president Obama if a user had 'liked' rapper Jay Z. While that was a statistical fact – people who liked Jay Z were more likely to like Obama – it was one of the statistical truths Facebook couldn’t be seen espousing.

    I disagreed. Jay Z is a millionaire music tycoon*, so what if we associate him with the president? In our current world, there’s a long list of Truths That Cannot Be Stated Publicly, even though there’s plenty of data suggesting their correctness, and this was one of them. "

    The entire article is still worth reading. Don't get shucked by the Zuck, especially if that dickhead thinks he can run for president in 2020.

    * Note: Jay Z is not only a tycoon, but another kind of coon