Facebook Likes Are Revealing Your Darkest Secrets Without You Even Knowing

http://www.thelostancients.com/

If you thought you were going to make it through one day without reading about a new Facebook study — ha ha! Joke’s on you, sucka! New social media research claims that the things you “like” on Facebook and beyond are revealing a lot more about yourself than you may like others to know. I.E., whether you’re gay, straight, smart, dumb, liberal, conservative, etc.

Well, this might be awkward for some.

The findings, which were published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that personalities and behavior and whether people drink, smoke, or do drugs are just some of the things that can be determined from their trail of “likes” that have been strewn across the Internet.

Some of the correlations aren’t exactly shocking. For instance, men who liked TV show Glee were more likely to be gay; while men who liked professional wrestling were more likely to be straight. And drinking game veterans were found to be more outgoing than fans of fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett. Other findings are a little odd, though: There’s apparently a correlation between liking curly fries and having a high IQ.

Personally, I really don’t think people’s personalities can be determined on their likes. Sure, there are obvious links, but don’t we sometimes just like things for the sake of liking them? When I was on Facebook, I was a fan of “Rainbow cookies” because my co-worker and I were joking about them one day. I mean, rainbow cookies are cool and all. But I wouldn’t delve too deeply into what it means about me. If I hadn’t been talking about them, I wouldn’t have liked them.

However, the moral of the story here, I guess, is if you don’t want people knowing things about you that you’d like to keep private, don’t like anything on the Internet. Or hope a “hate” button is invented. That’ll really baffle people.

Do you like lots of things online?