Search icon

Tech

07th Jan 2017

This is how Facebook knows you’re single

JOE

Zuckerberg knows all.

Facebook knows a lot about us. Where we travel, who we go with, what interests we have and where we live. Most of this information you give voluntarily by tagging yourself in places with different people and from your interactions on the social media site.

But did you know that behind the scenes they can tell whether or not you’re in a relationship even if you haven’t updated your relationship status?

According to The Mirror, Facebook looks at your frequency of posting to establish if you’re single. They found that those who are single tend to update their profile more than those in a relationship.

 

Facebook conducted a study where they looked the patterns of people who were single and then in a relationship. They explained:

“We studied the group of people who changed their status from “Single” to “In a relationship” and also stated an anniversary date as the start of their relationship.

During the 100 days before the relationship starts, we observe a slow but steady increase in the number of timeline posts shared between the future couple.

When the relationship starts posts begin to decrease. Presumably, couples decide to spend more time together, courtship is off, and online interactions give way to more interactions in the physical world.”

Furthermore, once people are in relationship their posts become more positive.

They added:

“The content of the interactions gets sweeter and more positive. We used statistical methods to automatically analyze a set of aggregated, anonymized timeline interactions.

For each timeline interaction, we counted the proportion of words expressing positive emotions (like “love”, “nice”, “happy”, etc.) minus the proportion of words expressing negative ones (like “hate”, “hurt”, “bad”, etc.).”

LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Conor Sketches | Tiger Woods loves Ger Loughnane and cosplaying as Charles LeClerc 

Topics:

Facebook,Tech