A study shows that what you ‘like’ on Facebook can predict, with remarkable accuracy, everything from your race to your sexual orientation, political affiliation and personality type.
Researchers studied more than 58,000 people who had volunteered to participate in the “myPersonality” application on Facebook, in which subscribers allowed access to their list of ‘likes,’ as well as the results of online personality tests that the scientists asked the participants to take. The researchers wanted to see whether such information, which is publicly available on many Facebook pages, could predict a number of aspects about Facebook users’ lives that they presumably kept to themselves, such as sexual orientation, ethnic origin, political views, religion, personality traits, substance use (including cigarettes, alcohol and drugs), and intelligence level.
Feeding people’s “likes” into an algorithm, information hidden in the lists of favorites predicted whether someone was white or African American with 95% accuracy, whether they were a gay male with 88% accuracy, and even identified participants as a Democrat or Republican with 85% accuracy. The ‘likes’ list predicted gender with 93% accuracy and age could be reliably determined 75% of the time. The pattern of online liking predicted drug use with 65% accuracy and whether someone was likely to drink alcohol with 70% accuracy.
“The most important thing that we found is that you can predict a very wide variety of individual traits and preferences based on seemingly simple and generic types of records of online behavior like Facebook ‘likes,’” says Michal Kosinski, director of operations of the Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge University in England, a consultant for Microsoft on machine learning and the lead author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Some predictors were obvious: gay people were more likely to “like” anti-homophobia campaigns and Democrats liked Obama. Others matched common stereotypes: for example, gay men tended to like “Wicked The Musical” and Mac cosmetics and smart people were fans of “Science.”