In a new study that starts with a seductive photo of a woman looking innocent enough, Facebook observes about 40,000 individuals and analyzes their uploaded pictures for their relationships with the image. Then, what the social network ultimately believes to be the most common picture uploaded, the moment when your romantic feelings change, it ranks each user accordingly. It isn’t hard to imagine how most people, when feeling unable to find a “happily ever after” image, would imagine what some woman in black nylons is doing instead. Consider the study’s final chart. Those people face a “page,” meaning their headshot should drop from the top of the list. Facebook notices that those people’s headshots eventually fall out of the top 15 most-watched. So what should they do next? Do they eliminate those “Page” members and muck around with their portfolio of pictures? Nihilism? Well no, they simply skip the “Page” profile altogether, selecting instead one of those 25 photo albums that represents their “Identified.” As the new research notes, this seems more like an end-run than a proactive way of confronting this vague problem. Then again, Facebook might always offer the caveat that all of this activity is anonymous.
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