Facebook is way more evil than you ever imagined. Forget sharing your data with advertisers, that’s kid stuff. Facebook is now using clicks and shares to conduct experiments on you.
To see how people respond to negative posts versus positive posts, Facebook chose 700,000 users and manipulated their feeds so that some saw posts that only featured positive, happy, yay! content, and others saw posts that only featured sad, depressing, FML content. The experiment concluded that people who saw depressing shit got depressed and shared equally depressing shit. And people who saw nothing but happy sunshine kitten kisses got happy and shared kitten kisses of their own. Eureka.
Obviously, the targeted users didn’t know their brains were being digitally prodded by nerds in Palo Alto. We all might be being messed with right goddamn now. It’s all an effort for Facebook to further control our synapses until they can predict our online clicks and shares with Pavlovian accuracy.
BUT YOU CAN FIGHT THIS.
All you have to do is post stuff that will make your user data statistically indecipherable. You need to become a walking, talking, clicking and sharing statistical anomaly. Here’s how.
1. Couple your shares with completely dissonant statuses.
If you share a cute, aww-inspiring video, Facebook’s evil scientists will chalk your post under the “positivity” column. But if your video is accompanied by a status that is completely incongruous with the content, you’ll be tossed out of the study. For example, let’s say you want to share this post about cats standing up.
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You still can! All you have to do is pair it with a really depressing status.
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Guess which lab rat just got freed from the lab!
2. Combat your bio.
All that background information about yourself gives Facebook tons of data to work with in predicting what you might post. Obviously, users from certain locales are going to post and like stuff relevant to that locale. To pollute Facebook's location-focused testing, just post something each day that is completely irrelevant to the interests of people from your town.
Or change your bio completely so your education, age, hometown etc are utter lies. Just make sure your posts stick to your story.
3. Change your feelings offline before sharing online.
Facebook wants to know how their feed manipulation is affecting your emotions, but if your emotional state is affected by outside forces, you’ll be knocked out of their control group and your data will be unusable.
4. Just start constantly posting about cool shit like motorcycles.
What kind of mood do you have to be in to post about something like motorcycles? You don’t know and neither does Facebook. Just make sure you post without any emotional context.
5. Unfriend all friends, delete all personal data, leave any groups you’ve joined, and never post a status about anything but the weather.
Yours will be the purest and least manipulated Facebook experience on the entire network. They won’t have the slightest idea what to make of you. You might not score many likes, and your feed will be nothing but an endless scroll of blank space, but it won’t matter. Your emotions will be yours, your thoughts kept hidden in the chambers of your consciousness. You will achieve social network Nirvana, a being of pure and impenetrable is-ness. In the great online battle for control of your heart and mind, you will reign triumphant.
(by Bob Powers)
Designed by Cole Mitchell