Mysterious Facebook Articles Comments Sections

Above Top Secret hosts articles and forums that can be searched and viewed for over a decade, since its beginning, but have you ever wondered where Facebook's comment sections in articles go? Facebook comments are not likely deleted, as when you go into your activity log, you can perhaps find them this way. What are the comments sections used for? I understand why Facebook wants users to click articles (revenue), but what's the value in people responding?

When you like/comment on something it drives traffic to it. Your friends and possibly friends of friends will see it.

What milkweed said and they use those comments as part of their data gathering. Picking out keywords and such.

but what's the value in people responding

Analysing trends and opinions. Services like "disqus" and facebook-comments make money by measuring the reactions to certain phrases or topics.

You can pull a lot of data from this. Think of swarm behavior. A single profile holds so much metadate it´s insane. Geolocation info, cookies, posting times and intervalls, political direction, hobbies, liked topics, reaction times, food choices and so much more. Tens of thousands of datapoints and they run it through algorithms that produce statistics that will blow your mind.

David Kriesel downloaded each article on a big german news-website for over two years. Each article he downloaded up to seven times (to get the changes and redactions, too). What he is able to show about the lifes of those authors is just mindblowing, and that´s all from data you see constantly but lack the oversight to compile it.

www.youtube.com...
(video won´t integrate propperly into ATS so here is the plain link)

It´s German but by skipping through the graphics you should get the idea. One out of many astonishing things he pointed out was the different sections (sport, politics, tech etc) all had favorite posting times and you could even see them fatigue over the day when word count and phrases of each article went lower and lower.

He also could point out that two authors from different sections were always abscent at the same time. There would be no articles published by both. He then proceeded to find out that they go on vacations together and probably have something going on. Facebook photos, I think that´s how he nailed it, but he did not show in the presentation because of privacy.

And all sorts of other at first hand useless metadata that blew the audience away. One thing made me laugh very much when he asked "Who took vacation days for this congress in the past" and I also held up my hand. Obviously it would have never been secret where I went to for those days each year, if they(employee) had used metadata on me to see what I´m up to. If you work in research and development the angst is there that you´ll leave the company or spill the beans so to speak.

He also pointed out stuff like disabled comment sections in refugee topics and politics. He coud show how they "learned" not to open the comment section on those topics, with a fance timeline.

That guy is a genius.

Thanks verschickter, that's more of the info I was looking for. I wonder how many people red-herring, troll, and over-react to things because it's the internet or just because they know Facebook is watching. I'm sure there's a metric for that too.