Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Make up a bunch of fake political crap and post it to Facebook

As you may be aware, Facebook will now be sharing your personal political opinions, whether you post them privately or not, with Politico.
Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will include Facebook users’ private status messages and comments. While that may alarm some people, Facebook and Politico say the entire process is automated and no Facebook employees read the posts.

Rather, every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.
I don't recall giving Facebook my permission to disseminate this private information (it must be in the TOS, right?), but since they are doing this us Facebook users could have fun thwarting them. Just start posting random political comments praising each of the candidates. One day say, "I am a proud Democrat and I am voting to reelect President Obama, you should too!" then the next day say "Rick Santorum is my candidate and only he can save America!" Repeat with each of the candidates and political parties at random and ask your friends to do the same.

8 comments:

Rob Dawg said...

No, no, no!

"I want to support Romney except he hasn't taken a stand on saving the South Carolina legless salamander."

"Obama would have my vote in a heartbeat if he came out for panda rights."

"I was a Perry supporter until he went silent on cheese exports."

Anonymous said...

Wasting yet more of your life in the FB massive time suck instead of your family and personal relationships will "show them" fer sure!

Yet Another Wargaming Blogger said...

It will probably be as accurate as YouTubes ability to predict what videos I want to see.

Lou Minatti said...

I fully support cheese exports.

Yet Another Wargaming Blogger said...

Well, my right wing friends think I'm a communist and my left wing friends think I'm a fascist, so I look forward to seeing what FB thinks I am.

Lou Minatti said...

Yep. Just start posting random crap. Is Pat Paulson still alive? Throw him in the mix.

Yet Another Wargaming Blogger said...

I won't rest until the Paulsen/Nugent administration applies the Bush v. Gore Doctrine to cheese exports!

chickenlittle said...

Google and Twitter are trying to get friendly too. I get constant prompts from Google: "would you like to merge your Twitter and google contacts?"