The Dark Side of Facebook: How your data can be used to manipulate you

Opinion Analysis by Albert Geokgeuzian, Staff Writer

March 13th, 2021

Almost a decade ago now, an angry man stormed into a Target store outside Minneapolis and demanded to talk to the manager. His daughter, who was in high school at the time, was receiving coupons in the mail for baby products; was Target encouraging his daughter, a minor, to get pregnant? Well, the manager apologized to the father that day and called a few days later to apologize again, during that second call the father said: “I had a talk with my daughter, it turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. My daughter is due in August. I owe you an apology.” Target was able to figure out someone was pregnant before their own father, all based on the data they had collected on her.[1]

That’s the power of data, being able to predict the future based on patterns of behavior and past actions. That’s not even the only thing Big Data, which is massive amounts of data (information) on large populations of people, is able to do.

In late 2013, a team of researchers analyzed the Facebook profiles of over 58,000 volunteers who had agreed to share their data. What they found was staggering, [2]

They were able to accurately predict individuals gender with an accuracy of 93%, political alliance at 85%, religion - Christianity or Islam - at 82%, ethnicity at 95%, homosexuality among males at 88% and among females at 75% etc. these findings have huge implications, some good, and some terrible.

The authors of the study said this by the end of the study: “Predicting users’ individual attributes and preferences can be used to improve numerous products and services.” They later added “On the other hand, the predictability of individual attributes from digital records of behavior may have considerable negative implications, because it can easily be applied to large numbers of people without obtaining their individual consent and without them noticing. Commercial companies, governmental institutions, or even one’s Facebook friends could use software to infer attributes such as intelligence, sexual orientation, or political views that an individual may not have intended to share. One can imagine situations in which such predictions, even if incorrect, could pose a threat to an individual’s well-being, freedom, or even life.” The idea that anyone can deduce someone’s attributes based solely on what that individual “likes” while on Facebook, attributes that they may want to keep private, is scary.

The future was scarier than the researchers imagined. First there was the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had obtained the private information of millions of Facebook users and created voter profiles to subsequently sell to campaigns. This idea of using Facebook and the data we willingly give up to every website we visit to manipulate a population isn’t unique to the US; it’s an idea that Russia and Putin have used with significant impact throughout the Western world; they have used social media to rock democracies, divide nations, and influence elections.

Russia’s use isn’t even the most extreme way how your data can be used. A worse case is that of Myanmar. A few years ago, the Myanmar government realized that they could manipulate its population to be able to commit the ethnic cleansing of the majority Muslim Rohingya without major public outcry from their people. They set up a project, which was so secretive that only top leaders weren’t forced to check their phones at the door, and that created a vast web of popular profiles on Facebook with no outward ties to the military and they started to disseminate state propaganda to their followers. 

The majority of Myanmar’s population confuse the social media giant as “the internet” and so the attacks were more potent than they would have been elsewhere. But nevertheless, they used these popular Facebook profiles to dismiss critics of the military, fuel arguments to make people angry, and often post misleading photos of corpses that they said were evidence of Rohingya-perpetrated massacres.[3] Even Facebook admitted that they were used to incite violence in Myanmar. 

Myanmar is an extreme case; they were new to the digital age and so their government was able to use the advances in technology to their advantage. Is the same outcome possible in Lebanon? I would say no, however that doesn’t mean that all is good.

The Middle East has generally been secluded from the western world, particularly when it comes to data collection; which means that there isn’t a lot of data available about you or generally anyone from our region. That’s not to say our data isn’t sought after; on the contrary, our data is extremely valuable to companies outside. 

However, with the 2022 elections around the corner, I suspect Lebanese politicians will look into political advertisements as a way to target voters, like yourselves, and they might be seeking to discredit their critics or divide the attention of opposition voter bases to win seats in parliament. 

With the rise of people who have a following and share their political views in Lebanon, I expect to see more political ads on social media platforms that are:

1)     Talking up the party and trying to acquire votes

2)     Considered misinformation campaigns targeted to opposition voter bases.

The biggest problem with this potential reality is that Facebook doesn’t fact-check political ads, which means that the biggest social media platform, with the biggest voter audience in the world allows political ads to be run to specific audiences of the advertisers choosing without checking whether or not they are based on reality.[4]

All hope isn’t lost though, there is a way to fight this ‘future’, but it’s a rather challenging one. The most important thing you have to do has to do with your mindset, you have to be skeptical with everything you see online, bar none. No matter who has shared it, no matter how much it agrees with your opinion, no matter what; you either dig further into it if you are interested or ignore it completely.

Will it be easy? No, but I do think it’s worth it because your data is yours, and you don’t want to allow anyone to manipulate you into doing something you might not have done otherwise. Facebook hasn’t done enough to change their ways, unlike other platforms who have banned political ads completely, Facebook still allows them and it’s as dangerous as it has ever been. It’s on you to protect yourself.

[1] "How Companies Learn Your Secrets - The New York Times." 19 Feb. 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html. Accessed 25 Feb. 2021.

[2] "Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of ...." https://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802. Accessed 28 Feb. 2021.

[3] "A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar's ...." 15 Oct. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html. Accessed 4 Mar. 2021.

[4] "Facebook Says It Won't Back Down From Allowing Lies in Political Ads." 4 Sep. 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/technology/facebook-political-ads-lies.html. Accessed 4 Mar. 2021.