Does Facebook secretly record your conversations to sell you stuff?
Most of us have experienced a ‘spooky’ moment on Facebook, where content appears relevant to something you were recently discussing with a friend, or even weirder where it knows about a recent or upcoming major life event. Is Facebook secretly recording conversations? 😱
Read on to find out!
The answer lies in the Facebook algorithm. It plays a pretty big part in our day to day lives here at the good ship Preface. Whether it’s our community management team responding quickly to questions on an organic post to drive positive engagement and reach, hiding troll comment so we don’t get a pile on, or our social media intelligence division making sure that we’ve seen all the relevant information that’s available (don’t think that simply searching will show you everything).
It probably plays a significant role in your life too. Like it or not, Meta decides most of what you see, and naturally as a business, they’ll show you what benefits them commercially, not what benefits you, your bank account or your mental health.
What is the Facebook algorithm?
The Facebook algorithm is a set of automated computation rules that rank content across the platform. It determines what each individual person sees when they check Facebook and in what order that content is delivered. Facebook calls this “personalized ranking”.
The exact set of rules and calculations used by Facebook are closely guarded proprietary information and are constantly evolving. In the early days of Facebook, users would see a news feed in largely chronological order based on choices they had made within the platform, such as which ‘pages’ and ‘friends’ they followed.
Remember those halcyon days when we all knew what Debbie had for dinner or how Michael was having a Margarita with lunch on Monday? The dinosaurs among us will even remember a time when Facebook updates were automatically written in the third person… “Ahmed is: amazed at the Avatar CGI!”
Back then, we had a fair bit of say in what we saw, and we just took it for granted.
Over time, the Facebook algorithm has taken significantly more influence on what content is presented to us, with the claimed objective of ensuring that we encounter posts that resonate with our interests and values. Naturally, as a business Facebook wants users to engage with content and frequently utilise the platform, as this aligns with their commercial interests. Given the vast user base of Facebook, the platform takes an almost militantly ‘hands-off’ approach to manually intervening in algorithmic decisions, for reasons of both practicality and to appear impartial. The confluence of these factors can prove difficult for commercial users of social media, and play into the hands of trolls, detractors and bad actors, as Facebook’s algorithm notoriously views almost any engagement as ‘good engagement’ and seemingly indiscriminately promotes positive and negative content similarly (although, by nature of the human actions which ‘feed’ the algorithm, negative content often appears to have a winning advantage).
How does the algorithm work in 2024?
Facebook gathers colossal amounts of data about you which feeds into the algorithm, including content, communications (posts, comments AND messages), metadata (e.g. photo information, device data, installed applications, device IDs, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cell tower signals, stored cookies, default settings, language , IP addresses, internet speed, time zone, and any devices connected to the same network), every action you take within Facebook, many actions you take when browsing other websites, how an you interact with content, your ‘Friends’ list, your location and past locations, the location of others near you, and more.
Concurrently, the algorithm frequently evaluates every post, ad, Story, and Reel, scores that content and arranges it in descending order for a user based on predictions of their interest levels.
According to Facebook, the algorithm goes through four steps to determine which content matters most to each user.
- Inventory: What content has been posted by friends and publishers?
- Signals: Who posted this story?
- Predictions: How likely is someone to engage with this post?
- Score: How interested will people be in this post?
Think about it for a second. Facebook know that you’re friends with Li, that you’re both interacting and viewing with a lot of wedding content, that you’ve both recently visited a local business together that lists ‘reception catering’, that you and Li often also hang out with Jen and Fran, and that they’ve been looking at hen’s night venues lately. Is it any wonder they show you an ad for bridesmaid dresses?
So, does Facebook secretly record your conversations to sell you stuff?
The answer is probably not, because it would be enormously expensive to store that many recordings, but also, because they have so much information about you that they don’t need to. They can predict, and via the algorithm target you, with uncanny accuracy because they surveil you in hundreds of other ways.