You might believe that you can hide yourself by carefully curating your social media graph. Or that people's social media graphs don't necessarily reflect who they are.
Data science says otherwise.
This is a quote from Yuval Noah Harari's book "Homo Deus:
"In 2015, researchers conducted a study on Facebook which showed that based on 300 ‘likes’, an algorithm could predict a person’s answers to a personality questionnaire better than their own spouse."
Notice this doesn't rely on anything the person says or doesn't say. Just a collection of 300 things they "liked."
And this is why I can reliably predict many things about a person, including their political orientation, their conscientiousness, their openness to new experience, their comfort level with unearned hierarchy, from looking at their timeline. These are of course, educated guesses. But checked and backtested over the course of the 15-20 years that social media has been a thing.
I'm usually not wrong.
Sometimes I am. But I've learned to pay attention to what I observe.
And what I've observed is that the more that a person's timeline is filled with jokes, games, lowbrow memes and viral nonsense, the less likely that person is to be a serious and conscientious citizen.
It's one thing to be circumspect and post pictures of pets or family or activities at a reasonable frequency. Plenty of intelligent people who care about social justice never post anything about politics. And they don't have to. Maybe they are too busy actually working for change, to talk about change all the time.
Kudos to them!
But that's different from looking at someone's timeline and seeing a flagrant sewer of distractions. That nearly always reveals a level of personal and civic irresponsibility.
#amusedtodeath #distractions #climatecrisis #fascism #getserious
Ens mereixem tot el que ens passi.
Quiero dedicar esta foto tomada con un 50mm a las 18:00 del Sabado 13 de Junio en Barcelona, a todos aquellos incredul@s que han tirado por tierra mi credibilidad e incluso me han insultado en el dia de hoy. Algunos incluso por segunda vez en un intervalo de solo varias semanas.
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/EmilioMorenatti/status/1271836866946437120
🦉Nýktıméηı ❌👑
🇺🇦 Sean Prophet ⚛
Albert Cuesta