Facebook Data Mining

In this digital era, the social platform has become inevitable. Whether we like this platform or not, there is no escape. Facebook allows us to interact with friends and family or to stay up to date about the latest stuff happening around the world. Facebook has made the world seems much smaller. Facebook is one of the most important sources of online business communication. The business holders make the most out of this platform. The most important reason for which this platform is most accessed is because of its characteristic of being the oldest video and photo sharing social media tool.

A Facebook page helps the people to get aware of the brand through the media content shared. The platform supports the businesses to reach out to their audience and then establish their business belonging to Facebook usage itself.

Not only for the users with business accounts, but this platform is also useful for the accounts which have personal blogs. The bloggers or even the influencers who deal with posting the content that attracts the customers give another reason to the users to access Facebook.

As far as the usage by normal users is concerned, people nowadays cannot live without Facebook. This has become a habit to such an extent, that people have the addiction of going through this site every once in half an hour.

Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms created in 2004; it now has almost two billion monthly active users with five new profiles, every second. Anyone who is over the age of 13 can use the site. Users create a free account which is a profile of them in which they share as much as some information about themselves as they wish.

Some Facts about Facebook:

• Headquarters: California, US
• Established: February 2004
• Founded by: Mark Zuckerberg
• There are approximately 52 percent Female users and 48 percent Male users on Facebook.
• Facebook stories are viewed by 0.6 Billion viewers on a daily basis.
• In 2019, in 60 seconds on the internet, 1 million people Log In to Facebook.
• More than 5 billion messages are posted on Facebook pages collectively, on a monthly basis.

On a Facebook page, a user can incorporate many different kinds of personal data, including the user's date of birth, hobbies and interests, education, sexual preferences, political party, and religious affiliations, and current employment. Users can also post photos of themselves as well as other peoples, and they can offer other Facebook users the opportunity to search for and communicate with them via the website. Researchers have realized that plenty of personal data on Facebook, as well as other social networking platform, can easily be collected or mined, to search for patterns in people's behavior. For example, Social researchers at various universities around the world have collected data from Facebook pages to become familiar with the lives and social networks of college students. They have also mined for data on MySpace to find out how people express feelings on the web and to assess- based on data posted on MySpace, what youths think about appropriate internet conduct.

Because academic specialists, particularly those in the social sciences, are collecting data from Facebook and other internet websites and distributing their discoveries, numerous university Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), councils charged by government guidelines to review research with human subjects, have built up policies and procedures that govern research on the internet. Some have been made strategies specifically relating to data mining on social media platforms like Facebook. These strategies serve as institutional- specific supplements to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) guidelines guiding the conduct of research with human subjects. The formation of these institutional-specific strategies that at least some university IRBs view data mining on Facebook as research with human subjects. Thus, the universities where this case has happened, research involving data mining on Facebook must experience the IRB survey before the research may start.

According to the HHS guidelines, all research with human subjects must experience IRB survey and get IRB endorsement before the research may start. The administrative requirement tries to assure that human subjects research is conducted as ethically as possible, in specific requiring that subject participation in research is voluntary, that the risks to subjects are corresponding to the benefits and that no subject population is unfairly excluded or incorporated in the research.