Algorithm "Outs" Facebook Users

[Booze Zombie]

I'm too sure if this is really very... sound.

 

[Hashime]

This is why I refuse to use Facebook, and why I do not allow family members to post pictures containing me online. The last thing I need is a glitched computer program Identifying me as someone else and flagging my family again! My poor uncle, the gloves...
By the way, I am not kidding.

 

[Daipire]

What happens if you were joining "Shuddup, you whore, or i'll smack you in the face!" just to be ironic?!

I'm not sexist, i'm just ironic.... lol

 

[NoNameMcgee]

What rubbish...

I have some gay, lesbian and bisexual friends on Facebook, I'm also a member of a group supporting gay rights and another one called "Against Gay Marriage? Then Don't Get One and Shut the Fuck Up" (which made me laugh & is so true )

So does that mean I'm gay? Nope, it means I have gay friends and support their rights, and I'm comfortable enough with my own sexuality to be vocal about my support for theirs. This program is basically the epitome of "looking into things too much"

I also have friends who have dogs and I personally HATE dogs.

 

[deleted_scifidownbeat]

DELETED

 

[MelasZepheos_v1legacy]

Wow. And I suppose the fact that I am utterly straight (ish), but last time I checked had more than 60% gay or bisexual friends, would mean I'm actually in the closet?

Man, this study must know me better than I know myself.

Either that or it's utter bullcrap.

What is straight(ish)?

Straight (ish) means that I am heterosexual (sexual interest in women only), but in terms of romantic entanglements and an ability to see an aesthetic beauty, my tastes extend a little further. If I had to, I would class myself as heterosexual, but biromantic (which is to say I will only have sexual relationships with people of opposite genders, having no arousal when confronted with the same gender, but may maintain a romantic relationship with a male)

It's...complicated. In the simplest of terms, I only have sexual interest in women, but romantic interests in both genders.

That's when he wants to pretend he's straight in order to call this study crap.

Seriously, nobody who's straight calls himself Straight(ish) sorry if I sound like a bigot, but that's just a fact.

(I have no problem of any kind with homosexuals)

Well I'm very sorry i don't fit into your world view. Maybe ask me about my orientation instead of assuming to know it? Straight, gay, bi, they're words, it's what's behind the words you have to understand.

 

[Cain_Zeros]

Yay, some random jackasses at MIT can find out that I'm straight! Because the fact that when you click the name beside "In a relationship with" it's quite obviously a girl isn't enough, we need some advance algorithm.

 

[Spiner909]

...Scaaaaary.....
Yet another reason to avoid social networks!
For some reason, this reminds me a lot of police profilers.

 

[Billion Backs]

It's an interesting project.

And people who go like "durr cure cancer! this doesn't help nobody!" should realize that not every remotely scientific activity revolves around medicine and the many scientific discoveries or inventions are not necessarily providing any benefits at first, or ever. And that DOESN'T MAKE THEM FUCKING USELESS. Science is not about helping people, it's about discovery.

And I'm going to assume straight away that the aforementioned type of posters doesn't generally care much for theoretic physics or high level maths either. Dang.

And by the way, a program like this is not useless at all. It could be very easily used as a marketing tool for many products and services. Marketing's useful, right? It helps various industries make money, which turn into pay checks to the people who work there, and some of it might even go into further improvements of something...

 

[Simalacrum]

So a bunch of students made this apparently rather complex system that calculates the sexual orientation of a person through their activity...

Didn't it occur to them to, you know, just look at what the person's sexual orientation is set as in their Facebook account?

 

[Dogstile]

But the amount of gay groups i've joined for fun would be against me.

 

[splatterguy734]

You don't really need an algorithm I know a guy at my gym who's in his late 30's and constantly adds 16-20 year old girls to his friends list.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Is that an xkcd reference I smell?

For once, not this time.

 

[WitherVoice]

Okay. I call bullpoo in the highest possible order. This is not science, nor good statistics. The entire sample space consists of "people who share their sexual orientation on an online networking community"? Seriously. And people are even entertaining the NOTION that this crud will ever "find terrorists", for instance? Please. If applied to "find terrorists", it will find a bunch of teenage poseurs, and any terrorist that would be dumb enough to say "yes" to the good old form question "do you seek access to the United States of America to commit illegal, immoral or terrorist acts?"...

If you're sitting on a train in England, going north, and you pass a field of white, nicely woolen sheep in a meadow... then you cross the border to Scotland, and you pass a field of sheep... but they are all black. What do you know? That sheep are black in Scotland? No. That some sheep are black in Scotland? Possibly... technically, though, all you know is that some sheep in Scotland are black ON ONE SIDE!

 

[HuntrRose]

The project focused on the "homophily principle," basically the fact that like attracts like

However, this same algorithm only worked to identify gay men; lesbians and bisexual men or women were not as easily outed.

Doesn't that make it seem like the "homophily principle," doesn't work that well if it only applies to gay men

Or just that women are impossible to understand?

 

[joshuaayt]

Um, what? I'm gay. Almost all of my friends dislike most gay people, I put up with it. The majority of gay facebook users and, indeed, gay people in general, realise that they are homosexual after already meeting many of their friends, making any analysis (HAHAGETIT) completely innacurate.
Also worth noting that if this was being touted instead as a way to discover lesbians, these MIT kids wouldn't be able to move for all of the controversy. Jus' saying.

 

[riskroWe]

Nah it's pretty clever. It starts with one person who has a certain ratio of openly gay friends "n" and if n is greater than their threshold of say, 50%, they mark the person as "closet homosexual" and they do this for thousands of people.
Then they apply repeated iterations as more and more people are discovered to be "closet homosexuals" and that can push the n of other people over the threshold.
And after a few dozen iterations you've outed a whole bunch of people.

And it works for any aspect of your personality. As they said, if you like dogs you're more likely to befriend other people who also like dogs, because it gives you something to keep talking about once the pleasantries are over.

The hard part is setting a viable threshold. We can assume that everyone on person A's friendlist has something in common with him, so we've got a total sum. The rest is mostly guesswork.

Take my friendlist for example; it consists mostly of musicians, maths students, gamers, and people from my hometown. That tells you a lot about me.

 

[SilentHunter7]

I can't believe these people have nothing better to do with their lives than design this algorithm. Hell, actually going on Facebook is probably more productive.

Considering that they are MIT students, and this probably will get them their degree, I doubt it.