A new research paper suggests that not only can Facebook make stunningly accurate judgments about your personality based on as little as one page ‘like’, it could also serve you content proven to take advantage of your individual character traits.
Even more worryingly, at least one observer claims there isn’t much stopping vested interests from taking advantage of that information to further their own goals.
The paper, which bears the not-at-all-terrifying title Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion, was co-authored by David Stillwell and Michal Kosinski.
Stillwell and Kosinski were behind the MyPersonality Facebook app, which let users undertake a widely-recognised multiple choice survey. App users were then given a result based on the psychometric test, accurately detailing their ranking across five distinct areas: openness, extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
While users may have walked away with a deeper understanding of their own characteristics, MyPersonality did too. Stillwell and Kosinski were able to cross reference several million users’ personality traits across those five areas with freely-available information on their Facebook ‘likes’. The result: a list of pages that, when ‘liked’, accurately convey a user’s character traits.
The new paper demonstrates that it’s not only possible to tailor ads to individuals based on their personality, but that the ads work. Really, really bloody well.
To test the theory, Stillwell, Kosinski, and the paper’s other authors bought a whole bunch of Facebook ad space and targeted users who ‘liked’ pages they had linked to very high or very lows levels of extroversion.
Here are two of the ads they used: on the left, a makeup ad targeted to women whose Facebook ‘likes’ exhibited high levels of extroversion, on the right, one targeted to women whose ‘likes’ displayed lower levels.
The results showed that when an extroverted user was shown the ad tailored to traditionally extroverted qualities, they were far more likely to actually click through and purchase the product, compared to an introverted user shown the same ad. The inverse holds true, too.
The paper notes “our empirical experiments were performed without collecting any individual-level information whatsoever on our subjects yet revealed personal information that many would consider deeply private.”
So, those results were based solely on ‘likes’, with no consideration of a user’s gender, age, location, or any other typical demographic data, and even liking a page as seemingly innocuous as Battlestar Galactica can be used to determine if you’re likely to be an introvert.
Writing for Mumbrella, strategist Antony Giorgione states “you can’t actually buy a Facebook marketing plan based on psychometric profiling. Over the counter, that is.”
However, he suggests Facebook’s core purpose – to make as much cash as possible – means it’s unlikely the platform isn’t offering this kind of madly-specific ad regime like the one tested above.
The fact Facebook bears political advertisements makes the whole study so much more horrifying.
Giorgione references big data firm Cambridge Analytica, which allegedly mimicked the system used by MyPersonality to amass an accurate portrait of voters in the U.S. and the U.K.; Cambridge Analytica was involved in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and The Guardian has written about its alleged ties to the Brexit ‘Leave’ movement.
Combine that fact with the U.S. Senate judiciary committee estimates that Russian-backed Facebook ads reached a whopping 126 million Americans in the lead-up to Trump’s win, and the sheer scale of this technique’s manipulative potential comes into focus.
The paper notes this method “could be used to covertly exploit weaknesses in [a user’s] character and persuade them to take action against their own best interest, highlighting the potential need for policy interventions.”
They add also posit that “current approaches are ill equipped to address the potential abuse of online information in the context of psychological targeting.” That’s madly concerning, considering the boggling amount of data Facebook has on each and every one of its users.
Sobering stuff. You can read Giorgione’s observations HERE, or you could read the full paper HERE.
