On March 28, 2018 Facebook announced new privacy tools to make it easier to download and delete your data. These tools were an answer to the public outcry after the events involving Cambridge Analytica, the data analysis firm that gathered information from more then 50 million Facebook users.

Downloading all the data Facebook stores about you has indeed become very easy. All you need to do is go to your settings, click on Your Facebook information, where you find a link to Download your information. This includes photos you’ve uploaded, posts on your timeline, messages send with messenger, and more.

Overview of all Facebook data available for download.

But while the social network makes it quite simple to download everything it knows about you, it does not provide ways for how to analyse that data or to figure out what it means. Therefore I decided to download all of my data and have a look at it myself. I joined Facebook nearly a decade ago and have been using it a lot since. The result? A 622 MB file. But while I have been using the site for countless hours, I rarely upload photos or comment on anything. The only thing I do fairly often is like posts of friends and pages I follow. Also, I use Facebook messenger a lot, like really a lot. It is the main form of communication in my surroundings, leaving WhatsApp, Snapchat and SMS far behind. So for this analysis I’m going to look at everything I ever liked and all my messages.

While Facebook makes it simple to download everything it knows about you, it does not provide ways to figure out what it means.

Likes and reactions

One of the sections of the data archive includes all posts, comments and pages that I have liked or reacted to (reacted means using a different sticker than like, such as sorry or angry). It was a nostalgic moment to scroll all the way down to my first like, only to discover that I liked my own post…

My first like.

Clearly I hadn’t figured out yet why people use likes. Looking back at the data of the first years, it’s clear that I didn’t use the site the same way as I do now. I was only a teenager then and many of my friends were still on other media such as MSN or Netlog (a Belgian social network, targeted at the youth demographic and mainly popular between 2006–2009). The statistics that interest me now are whose posts I like most and how that changed over the years. I know I got to meet new friends and lost contact with old ones with the change of going to university but I wondered if that change would be clearly noticeable in my Facebook historical data.

The first thing I visualized were the people and pages of whom I liked most posts.

This image shows the amount of likes for my 20 most liked friends and pages. For privacy reasons, I removed the values on the y-axis and blurred the names on the x-axis. It was no surprise that the bar on the left corresponds to my best friend. The second bar however did surprise me! It was the Facebook page of a student union I joined only 3 years ago. Clearly I’ve been listening to all the “Be sure to like our new post” messages, I’ll be sure to bring that up next time they bug me about liking the latest post!

But while it was interesting to gain insight into this, I was more curious about how these likes were distributed over the years. So I extended my data processing to generate this image for every year. This just generated the same style of image multiple times, with the most liked friend/page of that year on the left and the 20th on the far right side. If I wanted to gain insight in the progress of friendships and my interests I had to keep my x-axis fixed as I visualized every year. Doing this resulted in the following image.

This image is much more interesting than the previous one! I can see how some friendships started and others died, for example, the third one from the left corresponds to my ex-girlfriend with whom I broke up. You can probably already guess when that happened.

Messages

The majority of all my data are message sent and received with Facebook messenger. Collecting all messages together revealed that I have about 60,000 sent and 90,000 received messages, not including some major chats I deleted over the years. That means plenty of data to play around with! Ever wondered what time of the day you send most messages? Well I did, so I created a graph showing my most active hours on messenger.

So to all my friends, if you ever want a quick reply, message me between 19:00 and 23:00! It’s interesting to see these statistics about myself but with 90,000 received messages I could also get an idea of the active hours of many of my friends. The messages are the only part where you can also analyse your friends. Your Facebook data does not include likes of other people to your posts and comments, so you cannot analyse who ‘likes’ you the most but you can analyse who sends you most messages. Which is exactly what I did next.

Okay that sounded to much as a stalker, I was actually just curious with whom I chatted most and how that evolved. Therefore I decided to visualize my most active chat for each day over a certain period. I decided to also include group chats because while they typically have more messages (you are chatting with more people after all), often times the majority of my messages were sent to a small group chat, so I didn’t want to exclude those in my analysis.