This is a follow-up to my earlier post on a non-study I did on FB. I call it a “non-study” because it wasn’t scientific; there were many potential sources of bias that I did not account for.
I still haven’t accounted for most of them. Still, I think the result is interesting.
A week ago, I posted this in my FB feed:
Yesterday, I posted this follow-up in my FB feed:
The goal was to remove a couple of potential sources of bias in what I did before: When I posted both of those social-media ID posts on the same day, did people only click one link because they thought the posts were the same? Did FB only show one of the posts in other people’s feeds because I posted them too closely together?
As you can see from the screen captures, neither of those biases appears evident. The result was the same as the previous non-study: More folks “Liked” the post with the explicit names of the social-media IDs than the one with obfuscated IDs.
This would tend to refute the idea that FB is suppressing posts with words like “Discord”, “Mastodon”, or “Discord”.
It’s almost as if it’s doing the opposite. Perhaps not including the names of the social-media providers made the IDs look more like malformed web links, and FB suppressed them for that reason. But that’s pure speculation.
Of course, the sample size is small. The second post was made on Super Bowl Sunday, which may have affected folks’ presence on FB.
Conclusion: None. As I said, this wasn’t a scientific study.
As you’ve already guessed, its main purpose was to repeatedly expose folks to the IDs I use in advance of when I’ll leave FB. If all goes as I anticipate, that will be a week from this Wednesday, on February 19.
Did it work? We’ll see.