Facebook Keeps You Hooked

Hey, did you know that Facebook receives tons of data from all of its users and it actually uses all of that data to keep the people hooked. If you use Facebook frequently, it means that it was successful by using the data it obtained from you, to make you use the app often.

Analyzing what you like

Do you ever find yourself endlessly scrolling through Facebook for hours and hours? Well, the reason for this is that Facebook learns everything you do on the app and uses the information it learns from you, to organize the perfect feed for you consisting of posts you love seeing or watching to keep you on the app.

Facebook studies the accounts you follow, the stories you like, the posts you comment on and then collects all of this data and stores it under your name. For example, if you see a post about cooking and then click the thumbs up button, the AI will understand that “The user likes to see content related to food and cooking”. So then posts which are tagged with #food and #cooking will show up on your page. So, the next time you open Facebook, you will see this content which would provide you with entertainment and ultimately keep you on the app. Similarly, it does this for all the billions of users and stores all this data in a database to form their Facebook feeds in a way to keep them hooked.

A research was also conducted in 2015 in Cambridge University showing that Facebook can analyze your likes to very accurately predict the following things about you: satisfaction with life, emotional stability, religion, alcohol and drug use, relationship status, age, gender, race, and political views. It additionally uses this information to analyze which posts should go on your feed, and the posts that shouldn’t be on your feed.

Cookies

Do you often see these cookie pop-ups when you visit some websites? If you browse the internet often, you probably see these all the time, and click ‘Allow all’ without really thinking about it. But, Facebook can track what you browse across the web by using these cookies. When you are logged onto the app, and simultaneously you search the web, Facebook can see this. By using this information, it can show you some more posts related to the content you are searching, which would make you more interested in using the app. This is how Facebook uses cookies to provide you with posts that you find interesting.