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Comment by nxb | Hacker News Reader

I can't begin to guess as to why you'd feel that way.

Facebook runs one of the top machine learning research labs in the world. They're among the most clever in this domain, by every possible metric. They've written extensively about how they employ machine learning across their entire product line, and are adding more constantly. They've acquired numerous ML startups and world-class researchers.

https://research.facebook.com/

https://research.facebook.com/researchers/1543934539189348

Respectfully, you're absolutely wrong, and I'm suspicious as to why you'd be intentionally spreading misinformation that they don't use ML/AI to fill in the gaps in their information about their users.

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The ML activities at Facebook seem to be focussed on delivering content and advertising optimally to users. They can determinine which posts or adverts you might 'Like' based on your friends choices, or those of other similar groups of users found by various demographics and metadata. It's right there in the research group page you linked:

> "We strive to find ways to deliver more engaging content in News Feed, rank search results more accurately, and present the most relevant ads possible."

I think it'd be a pretty poor use of ML and AI to use it to try and guess the gaps in your profile, and then fill them in. Of course I'm sure they try and show you content and adverts based on what they believe your demographic profile might be, but these beliefs are purely internal to the algorithms that make the decisions as to what to publish - they aren't used to populate your public profile.

In fact, Facebook want the profile information to come from you and for it to be as accurate as possible - to help those algorithms. It wouldn't be sensible or useful to just set your profile fields based on guesses, no matter how clever the ML behind it. As I said before, I think people ascribe too much intelligence to the way Facebook handles personal information - it isn't magic.

I don't know if they are using ML or not, but they filled in my "works at" field with laughably wrong information. I didn't bother to correct it. It's not far-fetched to me that advertisers would be interested in this kind of information- ads to your SO when your birthday nears, etc.

While you say 'they' did it, it's actually hard to know what is going on. Was it stale browser data that got passed in as autofill field values when you registered? Is it based on an old LinkedIn profile you associated with facebook and then forgot to update? Did you connect with the Facebook app on an old phone where you had contact details for yourself from a previous job, and synchronise them?

Actually, the LinkedIn profile is the most likely, people often try these things, signing up and click-thru acknowledging everything without thinking, then never touch the app again. All I'm saying is that often what you think of as external is actually caused by actions you performed and then forgot about, or never really registered in the first place. Although, some of this may well be down to 'Dark Patterns'in the UX, which should really be investigated and changed.

Nope- never worked there. Heck, I've never even been there. Not on linkedIn. Has nothing to do with what I do (Imagine I was an elementary school teacher and it said I worked at Delta Airlines). Never filled out a form. In this case, they used something to guess.

I do have a FB connection to the place, though.

Ok then, where is your proof that they are? It's perfectly possible to have world class researchers who don't use machine learning to do exactly what you claim it does.

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