- Did you know that Facebook is capable of tracking if you are in a relationship despite your relationship status
- Facebook tracks how often and what you post and can make a conclusion if you are in a relationship or not
- A Facebook executive explains how they are able to do this
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Did you now that Facebook has a way of telling that you are single even if you left your relationship status blank? Of course it does – it’s Facebook!
The way it does it is that Facebook tracks how often you post. For example if you post twice a day you’re basically telling the program that you are single, despite whatever information you put in your relationship status.
However, when you get into a relationship the frequency of posts drastically falls.
A Facebook executive described how they came to this conclusion when they were researching the matter. He writes: "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."
Facebook descrived that couples would often share items between themselves with a very increased frequency before they changed their relationship status. However the peak of sharing eventually falls off and Facebook explains it like this: "Presumably, couples decide to spend more time together, courtship is off, and online interactions give way to more interactions in the physical world."
Facebook also tracks not only how often people post but also what they post. They explain it: “The content of the interactions gets sweeter and more positive. We used statistical methods to automatically analyze a set of aggregated, anonymized timeline interactions.”
Facebook adds: "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.)."