Facebook Knows You Better Than Your Family And Friends

Facebook Knows You Better Than Your Family And Friends
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No one knows us as well as Facebook knows us, and new research conducted by Stanford University proves it.

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The study identified the social media platform is more clued up on our personality traits than our actual family and friends. Oh god.

The big reveal? It's all down to the digital signals we send, i.e Facebook "likes" and the analysis of data through algorithms.

Researchers asked 86,220 volunteers to fill out personality questionnaires which were then compared to computer analysis of Facebook likes.

The results revealed a computer could predict a participant's personality more accurately than a friend or a roommate with 70 likes, a family member with 150 likes and a spouse with 300 likes.

Michal Kosinski, a researcher at Stanford's Department of Computer Science and co-author of the study said:

"Given that an average Facebook user has about 227 likes (and this number is growing steadily), artificial intelligence has a potential to know us better than our closest companions do".

The Huffington Post reports the study used the Big Five personality traits used in psychology (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) to make links with the Facebook likes and interpret the findings.

It's all very Big Brother, no? Though given that Facebook had 1.39 billion monthly active users at the end of 2014 it's no wonder it can second guess our every move.

Still, the fact that a computer can judge our personality traits better than our nearest and dearest is mortifying.

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