Facebook reveals what people really like by making 'interests' data public

Once upon a time, when Facebook was used more like a social network than an AOL-style web portal forparents,the "interests" section of yourprofilewasrelevant.

Masses users whomigratedover from MySpace in 2007 simply copy-and-pasted their favourite movies, music and TV shows into this section while signing up for the site, allowing anyone to find out ifthey likeFall Out Boy orSoulja Boy without so much as a click.

Then, as Facebook grew and changed, so did the function of interests. Once listed prominently on profiles, the section now lies at the bottom of a user's "about" tab, where they canonly search for and selecttheir favourite things from terms already recognized by the system.

Behind the scenes, though, every Facebookuserhas another setinterests based on "information you've shared with Facebook, Pages you like or engage with, ads you click on, apps and websites you use, and information from our data providers and advertisers."

That interest list, usedto target advertisements, cannot be seen by others who view your profile which may be a good thing as these lists are oftenlong, surprising,and far removed from what you'd list as your interests publicly.

You've long been ableviewthe list of keywordsassociated with your account byediting your ad preferences, but up until recently there was no way of knowing how many others were algorithmically-linked to terms like "hipster" and "toilet" and "public displays of affection."

That changed last week with the launch of a newFacebooktool designed tohelp brand pages target specific audience segments more effectively.

"Facebook made public a huge trove of data about its users' interests as part of a new tool calledAudience Optimization," The Verge reported Monday. "For the first time it revealed not only the hundreds of thousands of categories into which Facebook divides its users, but also the number of people who belong to each one."

"You may have already glimpsed a few of these tags inyour advertising preferences," the report continues."But this is the closest we've come to a complete, ranked list of every interest on Facebook."

The number of items on that list, by The Verge's estimate, is282,000 each with its own number of audience members ranging from zero to1,466,365,990.

You can download theentire data setfrom The Verge'swebsite, but it's massive at18.2 MB.

So, the tech outlet also compiled a list of the top 2001 things Facebook thinks its users are into, as well as a series of top ten lists grouped by category.

The latter piece shows thatJustin Bieberis the most popular celebrity on Facebook withan audience size of186,828,600. Donald Trump takes the top spot among 2016 U.S. presidential candidates with29,184,270 users, while Apple'siPhone wins the gadget wars with a whopping428,558,240 people interested in the device.

Further down on the list of the top 2001 terms are more obscure emotions and interests like "couch" (43,467,290 users),"mystery meat navigation" (44,713,210 users),and "Linkin Park" (72,542,560 users).

A Facebook spokesperson told The Verge that theseinterests are formulated algorithmically from popular articles, music, and videos being shared, as well as from otherFacebook data sets.

"The sheer randomness of the list suggests that the algorithms are scraping keywords from your posts," The Verge notes. "MS-DOS, which is made up of two common letter strings, shows a bigger audience than PlayStation. Dog fighting somehow snuck in as a "sport" with an audience of 7.2 million, and arson as an "event" with 1.9 million (though both of these are likely to disappear soon, as Facebook allows you to report interests as inappropriate)."