About The Advertiser

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The Advertiser works with the Facebook Ads Interests, a list that Facebook autonomously creates for every profile. It is partly based on direct user behavior (liking, commenting), and partly predicted by a „Black Box“ algorithm. The list is categorized into hobbies, traveling, entertainment and more. Facebook’s prediction of my interests was sometimes true, but mostly completely wrong. It supported the hypothesis that algorithms are good at collecting but bad at contextualizing. However, I still believe it’s possible to make assumptions about my attitude, motivations and behavior from this list. A large number of entries where unknown to me, therefore I accessed the Wikipedia API to return articles on every term in the list. Furthermore, the tool compares every advertisement interest with things I've liked in the Network to understand for which entries I'm responsible and which ones Facebook creates autonomously. The Advertiser helped to deepen the knowledge of working with APIs and helped to create hypothesis regarding Facebook's prediction algorithms.