

What you “like” on Facebook can predict your demographics and personality according to a Cambridge University study. The authors go as far as to say these links could be misused by oppressive regimes.

The study involved asking 58,000 US volunteers to provide their demographic information, allow access to the list of pages they had “liked” on Facebook, and then take part in a psychometric test of their personality. The researchers specifically asked the volunteers for the demographic info rather than collecting it from Facebook profiles, removing the problem of people who refuse to put those details on their profiles or even actively list false information.

Having analyzed the data, the researchers put together algorithms based on the resulting connections. They then tested these algorithms by simply referring to the list of “likes.”

According to the researchers, the “likes” were most successful in predicting whether somebody was African-American or Caucasian, a question answered correctly in 95 percent of cases. Other categorizations that could be correctly identified in the majority of cases were male or female (93 percent), heterosexual male or homosexual male (88 percent), Republican or Democrat supporter (85 percent), Christian or Muslim (82 percent) and heterosexual female or homosexual female (75 percent.)

Other questions were harder to answer, with the algorithm only being able to tell if somebody used drugs in 65 percent of cases and predicting if somebody was single or in a relationship 67 percent of the time.

The big surprise was that some of the most seemingly obvious individual “likes” had a very poor correlation. Fewer than five percent of gay users had liked a page of an organization or campaign specifically related to homosexuality.

Instead the researchers found that cultural preferences were a better indicator. In welcome news for anyone who has ever used the term “friend of Dorothy”, it turns out that liking Wicked the Musical is among the best predictors of homosexuality, while pages more exclusively preferred by heterosexuals include the Wu-Tang Clan and Shaq.

The study also found the likes most closely associated with intelligence were Science, The Colbert Report and (less explicably) Thunderstorms and Curly Fries. Perhaps unsurprisingly, those who liked The Dark Knight were more likely to have fewer Facebook friends.

While the findings might simply be intriguing to most of us, the researchers believe it shows how Facebook or other parties could make more sinister use of the sheer amount of data the site has about users. Lead researcher Michael Kosinski told the BBC that “I can imagine situations in which the same data and technology is used to predict political views or sexual orientation, posing threats to freedom or even life.”