Exposed: Why Facebook Really Wants You To Use Its New Reaction Buttons (Video)
(N.Morgan) In Facebook’s typical fashion, its newest so-called ‘enhancement’ — the emoji reaction buttons meant to be alternatives to the much-maligned ‘like’ option — come with a rather important catch: social engineering.
This new update is also another great way for Facebook to data-mine all of your information and develop a psychological profile of all of its users.
According to Mic: “Facebook confirmed to Mic that it will use data gathered when you use the new emojis to alter your News Feed and learn more about what you like “Do you prefer Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump, or fashion to green living? Facebook knows this about you, and it will use the information to tailor your News Feed to things Facebook thinks you want to see.”
Facebook has vehemently denied accusations and suspicions that its updates are also psycho-social experiments, the platform’s notorious 2014 study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, proved users can’t be confident they aren’t.
Facebook Unveils New Reaction Buttons
Facebook users have become unwitting social media lab rats when data scientists manipulated the news feeds of some 700,000 people to study emotional contagion. The newest emojis, in that context, might immediately stoke suspicion Facebook is up to the same tiresome, creepy tricks.
“If Facebook’s goal is to change your behavior,” Mic continued, “they need to know your psychological response to photos and videos the same way the tobacco industry needs to people’s brain chemistry when choosing additives in cigarettes. For Facebook to compete with Snapchat and Twitter, it needs to water their algorithms with something better, and your emotions are a superfood.”
In today’s world the average attention span is now nearly non-existent and Facebook is a business, optimists might say tailoring news feeds to users’ reactions isn’t ultimately so detrimental.
Unfortunately, with over 1.28 billion users worldwide, Facebook’s platform offers convenient mechanisms to share vital information, which might otherwise remain obscured.
So what does all of this mean? According to ANTIMEDIA: In other words, Facebook, itself, isn’t the only interest at stake. Artists, independent media, small business owners, nonprofits, and an untold number of others rely on the social media giant’s diversity of active accounts to reach people who might not visit a traditional, stand-alone website.
Pessimists could argue that, social engineering or not, the user agreements account-holders ‘signed’ to join Facebook mean Mark Zuckerberg has free rein to indulge his every whim. Like the new Facebook emojis, other social media platforms perform similarly aggravating so-called improvements all the time — Twitter’s switch from ‘favorites’ to ‘likes’ immediately comes to mind.
Though Mic reported it had received clarification stating Facebook’s new emojis still ‘count’ in news feed algorithms as ‘likes,’ that could “change in the future.”
So this time, instead of complying and becoming a begrudging and resentful guinea pig, it’s simple to opt out of quasi-Orwellian Facebook social engineering; don’t “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” or “angry” any posts.
Continue to use the good old “like” button — until Facebook manages to implement what most of their users have wanted all along: a “dislike” option.
References:
http://theantimedia.org/facebook-really-wants-use-new-reaction-buttons/
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full
http://theantimedia.org/study-average-attention-span-8-seconds/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCntIwtIESnGhcfQmmT-WzyQ
http://video.beforeitsnews.com/facebook-unveils-new-reaction-buttons_53cf5b7fe.html
Who really cares. Sure, our feeds may be more enjoyable. But there are more important things to worry about out there.
Hello Angle#3(prelim),
Charlie here. EVERYTHING you touch, push, press, look at, respond to, time, type, associate, on FakeBook is being analyzed and custom matched to advertisers. You are being SOULED!!
Signed,
Charlie (they kicked me out of Fakebook. I kept clicking on the doughnut)
I don’t use fake book . I stay away form NSA data collection centers . That site is deficiently one of them .
Why are people still using facebook….
What a stupid comment! People use facebook for a myriad of reasons – TO KEEP IN TOUCH with friends or family living 600 miles away for EXAMPLE!!
Plus if you’re not happy with all the ads proposed you can just reply THAT DOESN’T APPLY TO ME (or is that tooooo much for you?)
Doggone, That’s so Awesome that You are being such a good little obedient tracked Zuckerberg sheeple that probably has 3000 fake friends on fakebook, dont you?
Why are people still using facebook? Because they are not very bright.
Ask Big dog, He loves not having Any privacy! He is a big fan of that.
People frequently like beautiful lies; religion depends on it.
All the big american names are spying on us and they work as a team to block out any compertion and to feed the CIA/FBI/NSA and Googles A.I systems with our data.
I watch sys-logs on my firewall and read some of the javascript files they download to our machines and we are now at the stage where some of these files contain a massive 5000 plus functions and thats in just one .js file.
Google has now taken to putting a popup box in your face is you delete there cookies and they are doing it on Youtube aswell.
My privacy comes at a price and i feed there servers tons of bunk data so that it becomes worthless