Facebook data employees work continuously to influence users’ moods and behavior

Evidence

Experiments are run on every user at some point in their tenure on the site. Whether that is seeing different size ad copy, or different marketing messages, or different call-to-action buttons, or having their feeds generated by different ranking algorithms.… The fundamental purpose of most people at Facebook working on data is to influence and alter people’s moods and behavior. They are doing it all the time to make you like stories more, to click on more ads, to spend more time on the site. This is just how a website works, everyone does this and everyone knows that everyone does this. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 940

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the surveillance-capitalism foundations thread from earlier chapters on behavioral surplus and prediction products. — connects to: Data analytics progressed from describing internal data to prescribing every process and behavior — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 79; Facebook’s Open Graph program captured user data across third-party platforms — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 114; Platform data extraction operates as a continuous cache-gathering of social life. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 411 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Facebook cannot stop exploiting user emotions while revenue depends on prediction. #complicates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 959
• Data mining actively reshapes and changes human minds #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1680
• Facebook’s design intentionally exploits variable-reward dopamine hits to maximize user time. #exemplifies (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1437
• Facebook engineers openly aspired to map all human behavior #corroborates (0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1580
• Normal human activities that feel unproductive become exploited as data #complicates (0.70) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 675