I had Data Selfie monitor my Facebook behavior for a week, and the results are surprising. What I read on Facebook seems to hover somewhere in the middle between the extremes for almost every aspect. But what I write seems to be extreme: what I type on Facebook shows me to be ultra-conservative and traditional, quite impulsive and contemplative, fairly competitive and ultra-laid-back – all in comparison to the rest of Facebook.
Data Selfie analyses not only our personalities, but also our political and religious orientation, our preferences and our intelligence, our satisfaction with life, our psychological gender and our leadership skills. After a week of being watched by Data Selfie, I appear to be dumber than more than half of all Facebook users and only averagely satisfied with life. I appear to be psychologically female, non-religious and left-wing. According to the analysis, it is likely that I eat out often and am influenced by social media when I make a purchase, but not by family.
Data Selfie’s judgments are far removed from my self- hosptial ceos mailing list image. This makes it difficult for me to take the results of artificial intelligence (AI) unleashed on big data very seriously, especially since they only concern a period of one week of Facebook use. Fortunately, my wounded self-esteem is supported by a renowned professional in the academic world, who, when asked, declares that this form of AI (think: IBM’s Watson ) is “nonsense”, on condition that he may remain anonymous. Nevertheless, I will have to learn to live with the judgments of AI, because quite a few companies build a similar image of me.
Individual influence
Back to Cambridge Analytica. profile for all 220 million Americans, based on 5,000 data points that are constantly updated. Each of these citizens is approached individually by the company ( microtargeting ) based on their OCEAN personalities. For example, during the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica served 40,000 to 50,000 different advertisements every day . According to Scout, the company not only uses advertisements, but also bots (pdf), Facebook dark posts (which are only visible to the targeted person), A/B testing and networks that produce fake news .