THE TRUTH ABOUT YOUR FACEBOOK FRIENDS
This book is about Big Data, in general. But this chapter has mostly emphasized Google searches, which I have argued reveal a hidden world very different from the one we think we see. So are other Big Data sources digital truth serum, as well? The fact is, many Big Data sources, such as Facebook, are often the opposite of digital truth serum.
On social media, as in surveys, you have no incentive to tell the truth. On social media, much more so than in surveys, you have a large incentive to make yourself look good. Your online presence is not anonymous, after all. You are courting an audience and telling your friends, family members, colleagues, acquaintances, and strangers who you are.
To see how biased data pulled from social media can be, consider the relative popularity of the Atlantic, a respected, highbrow monthly magazine, versus the National Enquirer, a gossipy, often-sensational magazine. Both publications have similar average circulations, selling a few hundred thousand copies. (The National Enquirer is a weekly, so it actually sells more total copies.) There are also a comparable number of Google searches for each magazine.
However, on Facebook, roughly 1.5 million people either like the Atlantic or discuss articles from the Atlantic on their profiles. Only about 50,000 like the Enquirer or discuss its contents.
ATLANTIC VS. NATIONAL ENQUIRER POPULARITY COMPARED BY DIFFERENT SOURCES
Circulation
Roughly 1 Atlantic for every 1 National Enquirer
Google Searches
1 Atlantic for every 1 National Enquirer
Facebook Likes
27 Atlantic for every 1 National Enquirer
For assessing magazine popularity, circulation data is the ground truth. Google data comes close to matching it. And Facebook data is overwhelmingly biased against the trashy tabloid, making it the worst data for determining what people really like.
And as with reading preferences, so with life. On Facebook, we show our cultivated selves, not our true selves. I use Facebook data in this book, in fact in this chapter, but always with this caveat in mind.
To gain a better understanding of what social media misses, let’s return to pornography for a moment. First, we need to address the common belief that the internet is dominated by smut. This isn’t true. The majority of content on the internet is nonpornographic. For instance, of the top ten most visited websites, not one is pornographic. So the popularity of porn, while enormous, should not be overstated.
Yet, that said, taking a close look at how we like and share pornography makes it clear that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter only provide a limited window into what’s truly popular on the internet. There are large subsets of the web that operate with massive popularity but little social presence.
The most popular video of all time, as of this writing, is Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” a goofy pop music video that satirizes trendy Koreans. It’s been viewed about 2.3 billion times on YouTube alone since its debut in 2012. And its popularity is clear no matter what site you are on. It’s been shared across different social media platforms tens of millions of times.
The most popular pornographic video of all time may be “Great Body, Great Sex, Great Blowjob.” It’s been viewed more than 80 million times. In other words, for every thirty views of “Gangnam Style,” there has been about at least one view of “Great Body, Great Sex, Great Blowjob.” If social media gave us an accurate view of the videos people watched, “Great Body, Great Sex, Great Blowjob” should be posted millions of times. But this video has been shared on social media only a few dozen times and always by porn stars, not by average users. People clearly do not feel the need to advertise their interest in this video to their friends.
Facebook is digital brag-to-my-friends-about-how-good-my-life-is serum. In Facebook world, the average adult seems to be happily married, vacationing in the Caribbean, and perusing the Atlantic. In the real world, a lot of people are angry, on supermarket checkout lines, peeking at the National Enquirer, ignoring the phone calls from their spouse, whom they haven’t slept with in years. In Facebook world, family life seems perfect. In the real world, family life is messy. It can occasionally be so messy that a small number of people even regret having children. In Facebook world, it seems every young adult is at a cool party Saturday night. In the real world, most are home alone, binge-watching shows on Netflix. In Facebook world, a girlfriend posts twenty-six happy pictures from her getaway with her boyfriend. In the real world, immediately after posting this, she Googles “my boyfriend won’t have sex with me.” And, perhaps at the same time, the boyfriend watches “Great Body, Great Sex, Great Blowjob.”
DIGITAL TRUTH
DIGITAL LIES
• Searches
• Social media posts
• Views
• Social media likes
• Clicks
• Dating profiles
• Swipes
THE TRUTH ABOUT YOUR CUSTOMERS
In the early morning of September 5, 2006, Facebook introduced a major update to its home page. The early versions of Facebook had only allowed users to click on profiles of their friends to learn what they were doing. The website, considered a big success, had at the time 9.4 million users.
But after months of hard work, engineers had created something they called “News Feed,” which would provide users with updates on the activities of all their friends.
Users immediately reported that they hated News Feed. Ben Parr, a Northwestern undergraduate, created “Students Against Facebook news feed.” He said that “news feed is just too creepy, too stalker-esque, and a feature that has to go.” Within a few days, the group had 700,000 members echoing Parr’s sentiment. One University of Michigan junior told the Michigan Daily, “I’m really creeped out by the new Facebook. It makes me feel like a stalker.”
David Kirkpatrick tells this story in his authorized account of the website’s history, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World. He dubs the introduction of News Feed “the biggest crisis Facebook has ever faced.” But Kirkpatrick reports that when he interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder and head of the rapidly growing company, the CEO was unfazed.
The reason? Zuckerberg had access to digital truth serum: numbers on people’s clicks and visits to Facebook. As Kirkpatrick writes:
Zuckerberg in fact knew that people liked the News Feed, no matter what they were saying in the groups. He had the data to prove it. People were spending more time on Facebook, on average, than before News Feed launched. And they were doing more there—dramatically more. In August, users viewed 12 billion pages on the service. But by October, with News Feed under way, they viewed 22 billion.
And that was not all the evidence at Zuckerberg’s disposal. Even the viral popularity of the anti–News Feed group was evidence of the power of News Feed. The group was able to grow so rapidly precisely because so many people had heard that their friends had joined—and they learned this through their News Feed.
In other words, while people were joining in a big public uproar over how unhappy they were about seeing all the details of their friends’ lives on Facebook, they were coming back to Facebook to see all the details of their friends’ lives. News Feed stayed. Facebook now has more than one billion daily active users.
In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, says that great businesses are built on secrets, either secrets about nature or secrets about people. Jeff Seder, as discussed in Chapter 3, found the natural secret that left ventricle size predicted horse performance. Google found the natural secret of how powerful the information in links can be.
Thiel defines “secrets about people” as “things that people don’t know about themselves or things they hide because they don’t want others to know.” These kinds of businesses, in other words, are built on people’s lies.
You could argue that all of Facebook is founded on an unpleasant secret about people that Zuckerberg learned
while at Harvard. Zuckerberg, early in his sophomore year, created a website for his fellow students called Facemash. Modeled on a site called “Am I Hot or Not?,” Facemash would present pictures of two Harvard students and then have other students judge who was better looking.
The sophomore’s site was greeted with outrage. The Harvard Crimson, in an editorial, accused young Zuckerberg of “catering to the worst side” of people. Hispanic and African-American groups accused him of sexism and racism. Yet, before Harvard administrators shut down Zuckerberg’s internet access—just a few hours after the site was founded—450 people had viewed the site and voted 22,000 times on different images. Zuckerberg had learned an important secret: people can claim they’re furious, they can decry something as distasteful, and yet they’ll still click.
And he learned one more thing: for all their professions of seriousness, responsibility, and respect for others’ privacy, people, even Harvard students, had a great interest in evaluating people’s looks. The views and votes told him that. And later—since Facemash proved too controversial—he took this knowledge of just how interested people could be in superficial facts about others they sort of knew and harnessed it into the most successful company of his generation.
Netflix learned a similar lesson early on in its life cycle: don’t trust what people tell you; trust what they do.
Originally, the company allowed users to create a queue of movies they wanted to watch in the future but didn’t have time for at the moment. This way, when they had more time, Netflix could remind them of those movies.
However, Netflix noticed something odd in the data. Users were filling their queues with plenty of movies. But days later, when they were reminded of the movies on the queue, they rarely clicked.
What was the problem? Ask users what movies they plan to watch in a few days, and they will fill the queue with aspirational, highbrow films, such as black-and-white World War II documentaries or serious foreign films. A few days later, however, they will want to watch the same movies they usually want to watch: lowbrow comedies or romance films. People were consistently lying to themselves.
Faced with this disparity, Netflix stopped asking people to tell them what they wanted to see in the future and started building a model based on millions of clicks and views from similar customers. The company began greeting its users with suggested lists of films based not on what they claimed to like but on what the data said they were likely to view. The result: customers visited Netflix more frequently and watched more movies.
“The algorithms know you better than you know yourself,” says Xavier Amatriain, a former data scientist at Netflix.
CAN WE HANDLE THE TRUTH?
You may find parts of this chapter depressing. Digital truth serum has revealed an abiding interest in judging people based on their looks; the continued existence of millions of closeted gay men; a meaningful percentage of women fantasizing about rape; widespread animus against African-Americans; a hidden child abuse and self-induced abortion crisis; and an outbreak of violent Islamophobic rage that only got worse when the president appealed for tolerance. Not exactly cheery stuff. Often, after I give a talk on my research, people come up to me and say, “Seth, it’s all very interesting. But it’s so depressing.”
I can’t pretend there isn’t a darkness in some of this data. If people consistently tell us what they think we want to hear, we will generally be told things that are more comforting than the truth. Digital truth serum, on average, will show us that the world is worse than we have thought.
Do we need to know this? Learning about Google searches, porn data, and who clicks on what might not make you think, “This is great. We can understand who we really are.” You might instead think, “This is horrible. We can understand who we really are.”
But the truth helps—and not just for Mark Zuckerberg or others looking to attract clicks or customers. There are at least three ways that this knowledge can improve our lives.
First, there can be comfort in knowing that you are not alone in your insecurities and embarrassing behavior. It can be nice to know others are insecure about their bodies. It is probably nice for many people—particularly those who aren’t having much sex—to know the whole world isn’t fornicating like rabbits. And it may be valuable for a high school boy in Mississippi with a crush on the quarterback to know that, despite the low numbers of openly gay men around him, plenty of others feel the same kinds of attraction.
There’s another area—one I haven’t yet discussed—where Google searches can help show you are not alone. When you were young, a teacher may have told you that, if you have a question, you should raise your hand and ask it because if you’re confused, others are, too. If you were anything like me, you ignored your teacher’s advice and sat there silently, afraid to open your mouth. Your questions were too dumb, you thought; everyone else’s were more profound. The anonymous, aggregate Google data can tell us once and for all how right our teachers were. Plenty of basic, sub-profound questions lurk in other minds, too.
Consider the top questions Americans had during Obama’s 2014 State of the Union speech. (See the color photo at end of the book.)
YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY ONE WONDERING: TOP GOOGLED QUESTIONS DURING THE STATE OF THE UNION
How old is Obama?
Who is sitting next to Biden?
Why is Boehner wearing a green tie?
Why is Boehner orange?
Now, you might read these questions and think they speak poorly of our democracy. To be more concerned about the color of someone’s tie or his skin tone instead of the content of the president’s speech doesn’t reflect well on us. To not know who John Boehner, then the Speaker of the House of Representatives, is also doesn’t say much for our political engagement.
I prefer instead to think of such questions as demonstrating the wisdom of our teachers. These are the types of questions people usually don’t raise, because they sound too silly. But lots of people have them—and Google them.
In fact, I think Big Data can give a twenty-first-century update to a famous self-help quote: “Never compare your insides to everyone else’s outsides.”
A Big Data update may be: “Never compare your Google searches to everyone else’s social media posts.”
Compare, for example, the way that people describe their husbands on public social media and in anonymous searches.
TOP WAYS PEOPLE DESCRIBE THEIR HUSBANDS
SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS
SEARCHES
the best
gay
my best friend
a jerk
amazing
amazing
the greatest
annoying
so cute
mean
Since we see other people’s social media posts but not their searches, we tend to exaggerate how many women consistently think their husbands are “the best,” “the greatest,” and “so cute.”* We tend to minimize how many women think their husbands are “a jerk,” “annoying,” and “mean.” By analyzing anonymous and aggregate data, we may all understand that we’re not the only ones who find marriage, and life, difficult. We may learn to stop comparing our searches to everyone else’s social media posts.
The second benefit of digital truth serum is that it alerts us to people who are suffering. The Human Rights Campaign has asked me to work with them in helping educate men in certain states about the possibility of coming out of the closet. They are looking to use the anonymous and aggregate Google search data to help them decide where best to target their resources. Similarly, child protective service agencies have contacted me to learn in what parts of the country there may be far more child abuse than they are recording.
One surprising topic I was also contacted about: vaginal odors. When I first wrote about this in the New York Times, of all places, I did so in an ironic tone. The section made me, and others, chuckle.
However, when I later explored some of the message boards that come up
when someone makes these searches they included numerous posts from young girls convinced that their lives were ruined due to anxiety about vaginal odor. It’s no joke. Sex ed experts have contacted me, asking how they can best incorporate some of the internet data to reduce the paranoia among young girls.
While I feel a bit out of my depth on all these matters, they are serious, and I believe data science can help.
The final—and, I think, most powerful—value in this digital truth serum is indeed its ability to lead us from problems to solutions. With more understanding, we might find ways to reduce the world’s supply of nasty attitudes.
Let’s return to Obama’s speech about Islamophobia. Recall that every time Obama argued that people should respect Muslims more, the very people he was trying to reach became more enraged.
Google searches, however, reveal that there was one line that did trigger the type of response then-president Obama might have wanted. He said, “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes and, yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defense of our country.”
After this line, for the first time in more than a year, the top Googled noun after “Muslim” was not “terrorists,” “extremists,” or “refugees.” It was “athletes,” followed by “soldiers.” And, in fact, “athletes” kept the top spot for a full day afterward.
When we lecture angry people, the search data implies that their fury can grow. But subtly provoking people’s curiosity, giving new information, and offering new images of the group that is stoking their rage may turn their thoughts in different, more positive directions.
Everybody Lies Page 13