The Facebook-Politico connection

I don’t know how many of you are on Facebook, but I am, and I’m part of a “closed” political discussion group, not unlike an e-mail list or listserv. Right now because of the debates, the insults are flying fast and furious between Ron Paul supporters and traditional conservatives. Frankly, I don’t like the new Politico-Facebook partnership. In fact, I’m horrified. I wouldn’t like it anymore than the small print notice at the bottom of print magazine subscriptions that says they sell their mailing lists, but the Politico website is an Obama water carrier. It’s good for a conservative to read it, but it’s better to know what a real $100 bill looks like rather than study the counterfeit bill. Just because they say actual human employees won’t be reading this stuff, doesn’t mean that won’t happen—or that rogue employees** working undercover won’t pass it along either out of commitment to the party apparatchiks or for profit. Here’s the gist of it from All things D

“A partnership between Facebook and Politico announced today is one of the more far-reaching efforts. It will consist of sentiment analysis reports and voting-age user surveys, accompanied by stories by Politico reporters.

Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will include Facebook users’ private status messages and comments. While that may alarm some people, Facebook and Politico say the entire process is automated and no Facebook employees read the posts.

Rather, every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.

This is similar to the way Google offers reports on search trends based on its users’ aggregate search activities.”

The solution, of course, is to get off Facebook or only discuss your latest operation, the grandchildren or what’s for dinner (and many do that).

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**I was a librarian at Ohio State, which had the grand daddy of all computerized library systems—other major libraries built on our experience/shoulders, then quickly passed us up as commercial efforts (like those on the internet) became available. But back in the “old days” we always had student employees who knew more than their bosses (like me) who could send deans overdue notices for nonsense. Even 15 years later, when we were still using bundles of microfiche to check overdue books and were supposed to look only for a specific ID number, it wasn’t too tough to look at the alphabetic list (also included) and see which high flying, overpaid professor had 200 books checked out to his office using the library as his personal collection.