Graph Search and the Triumph of Internet Foolishness

By Reid Rosefelt

One of the most stunning achievements of the Internet is the speediness with which it can spread misinformation, stupidity and lies.   There have been dummies since the dawn of time, but they have previously lacked the technology to unleash the virus of their brainlessness to untold millions with the swiftness and ease we enjoy today.   There is no way that so many seemingly sentient people could believe that the President of the United States wasn’t born in the U.S. if it wasn’t for the power of the web.  Even as big a blowhard as Donald Trump would not to be able to accomplish this without the Internet.

And now we have Graph Search.  As I wrote last week,  Graph Search has the potential to do enormous good, but quickly I realized that it would also be another force for the triumph of stupidity in the modern world.

As I was turning in my blog copy,  a guy named Tom Scott put up a Tumblr blog, “Actual Facebook Graph Searches,” which quickly went viral.  Scott searched things like married people who like Prostitutes, current employers of people who like Racism, and more disturbingly, family members of people who live in China and like Falun Gong and Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran.  Gizmodo  also found people who announced on Facebook their liking for “Shitting my pants,” and Mashable  used Graph Search to suggest that People Who Like Honey Boo Boo Like Playing Dragon City,  Musicians like to play Tetris Battle, Apple Employees listen to David Guetta, Google employees listen to Pink Floyd, and Mashable readers like “Inception.”

This information is frightening people, which is a good thing because it will cause them to clean up their Facebook privacy settings, but some people are taking some of these connections that are being drawn as being connected to something real, and I fear that Graph Search is going to be abused in the future by the media as an source of reliable information of one sort or another.  I hope not, but it is likely.  Graph Search is supposed to be fun and social, meant for finding out verifiable things like who among your friends like to knit, not this sort of thing.

Let’s take a moment to study the data.  The Islamic guys in Tehran?  They didn’t say they were gay;  they said they were interested in both men and women to interact with on Facebook.  Facebook isn’t a dating site and it doesn’t provide any explanation as to whether this preference is meant to be sexual and I know lots of people who use it that way.   So this Graph Search proves… nothing.   And once they hear about it–and they will–they’ll change their settings.

The Falun Gong has been subject to imprisonment, torture and other human rights abuses in China, but a totalitarian government doesn’t need Graph Search to find them.  They can make their list from the Falun Gong Facebook page directly, and find family members from that.  This isn’t secret information.  Understanding that leads to what the real issue is with Graph Search, which is not privacy, but “obscurity.” As Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger state in a recent article in The Atlantic,   “Obscurity is the idea that when information is hard to obtain or understand, it is, to some degree, safe.”   Hartzog and Selinger discuss the recent case of The Journal News in White Plains, New York, which published the names and addresses of gun owners.   The outcry wasn’t caused by the idea that there was information about gun owners accessible in a public archive, but that it was suddenly made easy for everybody to see.  And I think it’s more the issue here.  We may have been comfortable putting questionable stuff on Facebook at the time we did it, because we believed it would be forgotten an hour later, and only seen by our friends and maybe our friends’ friends.  To be suddenly confronted with Graph Search seems like a terrible betrayal to some.  While Tom Scott, the Actual Graph Searches Tumblr blogger who set off the media frenzy, may say, “If it’d be awkward if it was put on a screen in Times Square, don’t put it on Facebook”–most people don’t see it that way, and today many of them are freaking out.

If you think about it, most of the examples of the nefarious uses of Facebook come from likes and  you can remove them in a minute. Click the box that says Likes on the top right of your page,  click the edit pencil on the top right, hover over any Like you don’t want to be associated with anymore and delete it. Done!

Don’t want your name to come up in Graph Searches for anybody but your friends?  Learn how here.   If you don’t want all your friends to be able to find you in Graph Searches, make a list of the people that you trust, and set up Facebook so that only they can get access to your information and posts.  If you wish to correspond with Erin Egan, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, you can do so on this page.

Let’s proceed from the things that frighten us about Graph Search to the so-called information people are getting from it.  Examine the “shitting my pants” Community Page on Facebook, referred to by Gizmodo.  It currently has 635 fans, with a “People Talking About This” score of 13, which makes it a not very active community,  unless you compare the page to the “Not Shitting My Pants” Community Page, which only has 108 fans and had only one person talking about it all last week. Over one billion members and that’s all they could find?  Anyway, do any of you believe that “shitting in my pants” is more popular than “not shitting in my pants”?  Only on Facebook it is.

One video I saw made a big deal about a the results of a Graph Search between fans of Barack Obama who worked for Mitt Romney.  I used to have a Facebook page called “Save the Supreme Court–Re-elect Obama.”  Many of the people who joined it wrote angry, hateful comments about Obama every day.  I came to believe that these people searched Facebook for pages that had the word Obama in it for the sole purpose of trolling.  But if you were doing a Graph Search today, I’m sure you’ll be able to get people who like Obama, Sean Hannity, and Wayne LaPierre, and it would make perfect sense, or at least Facebook-sense, which is another way of saying absolutely no sense at all.

Likewise, the “fact” that “People Who Like Honey Boo Boo Like Playing Dragon City” over any other game is ludicrous.  Who among the untold numbers of “Honey Boo Boo” fans also like it on Facebook?  I love “Honey Boo,” but I haven’t liked her page.  These tallies are disenfranchising me and probably millions of other “Honey Boo Boo” fans. At the same time there may be people who claimed to like Honey Boo Boo on FB when they didn’t actually like it–as a joke. The same thing happens over at the Dragon City page and all the other games.  So do Musicians Like to Play Tetris Battle?   Over other games?  Really?

Pages that are well-run and advertise on Facebook get more fans, providing a lopsided connection to what people like the most in the world outside Facebook.  A large portion of the likes people do are “pity likes,” favors to friends who are desperate to rack up likes on their pages, or because they entered a contest, or they had to like a company page so they could complain about how much they hated it.  Don’t forget that a large portion of the profiles on Facebook aren’t people at all, they’re bots, but that doesn’t stop them from liking thousands of pages.    I just looked at my list of likes and I don’t give a hoot about most of them, although  I am relieved that “shitting in my pants” isn’t on the list. (Perhaps “relieved” is a poor choice of words.)

Correlating something like “Musicians” to “Tetris Battle” violates all rules of the scientific method.   You can rightly compare good data to another source of good data.  But when you compare a pile of crap data to another pile of crap data, then, in scientific terms, it all goes kabluey.  Journalists are going to do Graph Searches and report them as if they actually meant something.  Graph Search will become the Fox News of Facebook.

Despite our fury about privacy, I expect that you and I are going to abuse Graph Search for our own twisted purposes.  Did you know that Facebook keeps a record of all your searches?  It’s true.   But don’t worry,  Facebook claims that only you can see your search history.  Does that make you feel safe?  Hah!  If you want to whisk those sick searches away, here’s an infographic on how to get rid of them.

You have the power to protect your privacy if you’re willing to take a few minutes to do so.  Most of us already did it when Timeline came out.   What you have no protection from is the tsunami of illogic that is headed your way.  Idiotic Graph Search conclusions have targeted your brain cells and there will be no escape.