A daily stampede of 1.2 billion users makes Facebook the world’s biggest social media platform. This massive landscape comes with the usual creepy users. If they had a super-bizarre king, it would be Facebook itself. Recent investigations found that the company has information on people not using the platform and that violence is used to keep Facebook interesting. While its moderators struggle with PTSD, the company also wants users’ bank details, phone calls and know the last time when they had sex.

SEE ALSO: 10 Creepy Things Social Media Does To Control Your Mind

10 Brain Scans Can See Facebook

Most people have experienced the obsessive compulsion to check their Facebook page. Some might even experience withdrawal symptoms. Researchers decided to see if this so-called “Facebook addiction” showed up in the brain like a drug. The study was small and by no means conclusive, but the results were interesting.

In 2014, 20 volunteers answered questions about their Facebook habits and were diagnosed with a mild addiction. Afterward, each had their brain scanned while viewing images and pushing a button. The pictures rotated between Facebook-related pictures and road signs. The participants could choose when to push the button, but those who scored higher on the addiction survey turned trigger happy when Facebook popped up.

The scans showed that the platform caused a powerful response in the brain. Similar to cocaine users, the impulsive regions lit up. However, there was a big difference between people addicted to drugs and those hooked on Facebook. A cocaine addict’s prefrontal cortex is underactive. This region controls the impulsive areas of the brain and it worked just fine in the Facebook volunteers. In other words, social media addicts are not driven by real cravings they have no control over, but instead a complex mix of habit, cultural and social factors.

9 Users Have A Reputation Score

Reporting legitimate posts as false news is a problem on social media. To fight this, Facebook devised its own system to identify guilty users. Based on what content they flag, for what reason and how many times a user pushes that button determines a person’s “trustworthiness.” For some reason, this score only runs on a scale from zero to 1.

The system took a year to design before being implemented in 2018. The main purpose is to find the trolls and bullies. Many people maliciously report content as violations just to get a thrill. Others genuinely disagree with the material but because of personal preference and not because the post is inherently wrong.

The score is not an all-powerful fly swatter. This is merely one tool, used in conjunction with thousands of behavioral clues mined by Facebook to separate the genuine flags from the false. While this is clearly a great idea, the process that ultimately gives a user a score remains mysterious. Even more so; how these scores are being used.

8 Shadow Profiles

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive and founder of Facebook, appeared in front of Congress in 2018. During the proceedings, he answered tough questions about user privacy. In addition, he was grilled about shadow profiles collecting data on people who were not even using Facebook. Despite that this issue had been making the rounds for five years, Zuckerberg claimed he was not familiar with the term “shadow profile.”

This feature figures out the social circle and contact details of people who avoid Facebook but have friends using the platform. When these friends upload their own phone details, a shadow profile is created for every mobile contact without a Facebook account. Eventually, users with mutual friends give the site a perfect view of their social group.

Should somebody with a shadow profile join, Facebook will send them friend suggestions based on their social circle which, by then, is already known to the company. The idea seems to be a legitimate way that Facebook tries to connect people on the site. Even so, some people might not appreciate any company using their number, after purloining it from a friend’s phone, to create a ghost membership for them.

7 Secret Transcripts

In 2019, a group of third-party transcriptionists broke their silence. Facebook had hired them to transcribe recordings, most of which were voice conversations between Facebook Messenger users. The work was already strange, considering that some of the files contained vulgar topics and language. Additionally, the social media giant never provided an explanation as to why it needed the countless transcriptions.

Smelling a rat, the contractors went public. Facebook had no choice but to admit that users were being secretly taped through their phone microphones but added that permission was always given. However, this permission was necessary—and hidden in the small print—for anyone wishing to use voice messaging. When investigators combed through all the policies, they found nothing where users could agree to have their conversations recorded and farmed out to third-party transcriptionists. In other words, Facebook users could not agree even if they wanted to.

The company said it ended the project and that the transcriptions’ only purpose was to test Facebook’s speech-recognizing AI. This pedestrian explanation, whether true or not, was an admission that user privacy had been violated.

6 Moderators Have PTSD

A lot of users ignore Facebook’s policy against posting graphic, offensive and illegal content. That is where the moderators come in. Their job is to weed out these posts. In 2019, The Verge published an investigation into their working conditions. The original paper ran 7,500 words and covered an in-depth look at one of Facebook’s moderation offices in Arizona. During interviews, moderators claimed that the stress of viewing disturbing material, Facebook’s crappy employee rules and low pay created an unhappy environment.

Employees’ strategies apparently included smoking marijuana and having sex, which happened due to “trauma bonding.” Apart from struggling financially and working under what they described as Facebook’s “inhumane” rules, moderators buckled under a huge load of unsavory posts. These included child abuse and exploitation, racism and graphic violence. Several moderators broke down, developed PTSD symptoms while others turned paranoid by the repetitive conspiracy theories they reviewed.

5 The Brazilian Witch Hunt

In 2014, a tabloid posted a sketch on Facebook. The article claimed that the woman in the picture abducted children and used their organs for witchcraft. A group of people realized that the image “showed” Fabiane Maria de Jesus. As a result, the 33-year-old housewife from Brazil was attacked by a mob.

A graphic video showed the unconscious woman having her head smashed into the ground. She was then tied to a bicycle and dragged through the streets while a crowd cheered. The Military Police cleared Fabiane of any crimes related to black magic, organ trafficking, and kidnapping. Several people were also arrested in connection with the mob attack. However, none of this helped the victim. She was so brutalized that two days later, she died.

Facebook responded by saying the company did nothing wrong and accepted no responsibility for the murder. However, the attack could have been sparked by Facebook’s ignorance of Brazil’s fear of witchcraft and organ theft. Both are real issues, especially for the poorer communities. Facebook’s moderators allowed the post because it seemed mild but considering its audience, it was a cultural trigger that ended in tragedy.

4 FBI Recruits Spies On Facebook

In 2019, Business Insider reported that the FBI placed spy ads on Facebook. True enough, according to the platform’s Ad Library, the three ads went live on September 11. Despite the auspicious date and the cloak and dagger theme, the FBI was open about their intent. They were holding the door open for Russian informants.

When a person feels like giving Putin the finger, they can click on the image. The ad leads the future spy to another website. This page belongs to the FBI’s Washington Field Office Counterintelligence Program. A message, written in both English and Russian, informs the reader that the United States uses intelligence on foreign nations to protect its own citizens. Anyone with useful information is invited to meet with the FBI in person. This may seem like a strange suggestion but the fact is that 99 percent of Russian spies just walk into the relevant building and start spilling. When asked why they targeted the Russians, the Bureau would only reveal that the vast number of active soviet operatives posed a security risk.

3 Facebook Follows Sex And Periods

Privacy International is a Britain-based watchdog. In 2019, it discovered that Facebook had a creepy habit of following women’s periods and the last time they had sex. Of course, none of the women involved volunteered the information nor shared anything on social media. They made the mistake of trusting two period-tracking apps.

Named Maya and MIA Fem, users entered information to manage their health, birth control and even help themselves to conceive. The two apps, however, shared these details without permission with third parties that included Facebook. In other words, these third parties knew when the women last had sex or a period, when they were fertile and what birth control they used.

The apps started gathering details the moment a user installed and opened the tracker, before any privacy terms were agreed to. The information was passed on through the Facebook Software Development Kit, a product linked to the platform’s advertising network.

The unauthorized sharing of intimate details can be life-destroying. Experts are concerned that insurance companies and employers could use the information to discriminate against women by denying them leadership roles and making their premiums extra expensive. Why Facebook likes periods is anyone’s guess.

2 An Attempt To Grab Bank Details

In 2018, Facebook sidled up to a few banks. The company asked them to turn over the financial information of their clients. More specifically, Facebook wanted to eyeball people’s account balances and what they purchased with their credit cards. The Wall Street Journal broke the story and named some of the banks that Facebook approached. They included Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, and Citigroup.

In return for the financial data, banks would get featured on the Messenger app. This was enticing. Banks face a lot of competition from companies like PayPal. Messenger has over a billion users, which is a massive market and also Facebook’s commerce center. Should the app turn users towards using the banks, the latter would get an edge against their competition.

Give credit where it is due. Facebook shoved a delicious deal across the negotiation table but every bank thus far had said: “No, thank you.” One bank openly refused out of concern for their clients’ privacy, despite promises not to misuse the information. However, Facebook’s shoddy track record with privacy does not inspire trust. Least of all the idea that its staff members will eyeball every product or service you just paid for with a credit card.

1 Facebook Profits From Violence

In 2018, a journalist applied for a job as a Facebook moderator. The reporter took the position at a Dublin-based company called CPL Resources. This contractor has worked with Facebook since 2010. The undercover investigator was gathering material for a Channel 4 documentary called “Inside Facebook: Secrets of the Social Network.”

The training CPL provided was based on Facebook’s community standards. It soon became clear that not all abuse was created equal. The false employee was told to allow certain offensive posts. The training officer then provided two examples. One was real footage of a toddler being beaten by a grown man. The video was flagged as inappropriate in 2012 but still floated around on Facebook. Another was a meme showing a little girl being drowned with the words, “when your daughter’s first crush is a little negro boy.” When Channel 4 brought it to Facebook’s attention, the platform said that both should have been deleted.

It beggars belief that two graphic posts slipped through the cracks before being chosen as training material. Indeed, as much as Facebook protested that users were not being lured with violence to bolster their numbers and ad revenue, a CPL trainer told the journalist, “If you start censoring too much, then people lose interest in the platform. It’s all about making money at the end of the day.”

We all know Facebook violates our privacy. However, many of us underestimate how intrusive this is. (Hint: it is worse than you can ever imagine.) Facebook is not just spying on our interests and activities but our lifestyle, political alignment, deepest secrets and other personal issues we probably prefer keeping secret.

Facebook monitors you so closely that it probably knows you better than you do. As you are about to find out, deleting your Facebook account or even refusing to use Facebook or any of its sister services will not stop Facebook from tracking you. Facebook creates and maintains a profile page for you even if you do not use any of its services and that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Top 10 Creepy Facts About Facebook

10 Your political ideology

Facebook knows your political ideology even if you have never revealed it on any of its apps or liked the page of a political candidate. Facebook determines your political leaning by looking at your activities across its services. It then uses this information to categorize you as a liberal, moderate or conservative.

How Facebook really narrows down on your political beliefs remains unclear. Some analysts think it tracks your interactions with politically exposed associations. For instance, liking or interacting with the Facebook page of say, the National Rifle Association, will lead Facebook to conclude you are a conservative.^[1]

9 Your love life

Facebook knows when you are in love, months before you officially post in on your profile or wall. Thanks to years of analyzing billions (or even trillions) of data, Facebook can accurately predict the behavior to two would-be lovebirds.

Facebook knows something is brewing when it notices a sudden increase in the comments and engagement between two people. Would-be lovebirds start leaving an average of 1.53 posts per day on each other’s wall 85 days before making their relationship official. This increases to 1.67 posts per day 12 days before the relationship begins.

However, things slow down a bit when the new lovers begin their relationship. Their comments, messages and interactions generally become lower. However, lower does not mean bad. If anything, it means the relationship is healthy. The latest comments, messages and interactions always contain more worthwhile content than those sent before the relationship began.^[2]

8 Your call, SMS and MMS logs

Facebook saves the details of every call, SMS and MMS you send or receive. It saves everything about these phone calls including the names and phone numbers of the caller and recipient and the date, time and duration of the phone call.

Facebook retains this information for years. In 2018, some users who downloaded their data archives containing information Facebook had on them, found call logs and SMS messages dating back to 2015. Luckily for iOS users, this extreme breach of privacy is limited to Android devices since Apple does not allow third-party apps access such information.

In its usual fashion, Facebook denied it got access to its Android users call and SMS logs without permission. This is partly true since the feature was auto opt-in particularly with early versions of Android. You automatically agree to it by downloading and using the Facebook app.

However, several users have accused Facebook of illegally accessing their call and SMS data in later versions of Android that require Facebook to ask for permission to access your phone, SMS and MMS data. They claim Facebook accessed their calls and messages even after they declined its request.^[3]

7 Your existence

Many people do not use Facebook or have deleted their Facebook accounts over privacy concerns. However, this does not mean they are free of Facebook’s nosiness. Facebook minds your business even if you do not use its services. It knows you exist and has probably created a profile for you on Facebook.

Everyone has a Facebook profile as long as they have friends, friends of friends, friends of friends of friends, etc. that use Facebook. These so-called shadow profiles are literally invisible to the naked eye, since they only exist on Facebook’s servers.

Let us assume a hypothetical scenario where you do not use Facebook but your friends do. Facebook uploads and saves their contacts on its servers when they sign up. It then links these phone numbers with existing Facebook users, who it suggests they add as friends. That is the “people you may know” feature we see on our home feed.

Facebook creates a shadow profile for people like you who do not have a profile. It improves the information on your shadow profile as more of your friends sign up and upload their contacts. Facebook links your shadow profile with your real profile when you finally join. This is how it recommends friends you should add even if you do not upload your contact.^[4]

6 Your location

Google is infamous for its insatiable interest in information about your location. However, it has an undeclared competitor, one that we often overlook in issues relating to “location theft”, Facebook.

Facebook knows where you are at every moment. If you feel that is creepy, we should add that it also stores this information on its servers. So it knows everywhere you have been to, long after you have left and probably forgotten you were ever there.

Facebook tracks you using the Facebook app on your phone. The app tracks you every time, even when it is not in use. Facebook offers everyone the option of limiting the app’s tracking feature or even switching it off completely but as others have found out, Facebook still tracks you even if you opt out.^[5]

While it will no longer rely on using the location features on your phone, it will resort to using your Wi-Fi, IP address, Bluetooth, browsing habits, places you check in to and other contents you upload to the site to determine your location. Unlike the location feature, you cannot turn this one off.^[6]

10 Ways Facebook Makes You Smarter

5 Your pregnancy status

Facebook knows when you are pregnant or likely to become pregnant, that is, if you are not already pregnant. So you should not be surprised when you start seeing ads for baby care products. Facebook allows advertisers to target pregnant women and they will target you if they suspect you are one.

Facebook has refused to release information on how it identifies pregnant women. However, it said it rarely uses data from a lady’s status update to determine if they are pregnant.

This revelation is actually very creepy even though it is supposed to be comforting. A status update is supposed to be the likeliest way to know if a woman is pregnant, isn’t it? This even contradicts what Facebook told an advertiser about how it identifies pregnant women. It said it determines the likelihood of a woman being pregnant based on what they post on Facebook.

Facebook did not explain what it means by “post”. A status update is a post but a post is not necessarily a status update. Ad Age, which investigated the controversy behind Facebook’s ads targeted at pregnant women said Facebook was being “purposefully vague” about revealing how it determines if a woman is pregnant.^[7]

4 Your sleep pattern

Facebook knows when you are asleep and awake. If you do not have a problem with that, wait until you hear that it made this data publicly available to everyone. Anyone capable of writing a bit of code to extract this information from Facebook’s Messenger will know your sleep pattern.

Messenger contains features that detects when you are using the app on any of your devices. By writing a code to check the status of everyone on their friend list, a person can determine when their friends are online, offline or online but idle. They can then use this information to determine when they are awake and asleep.^[8]

3 Your breakups

Back to relationships, Facebook can predict when you and your partner are about to breakup, even before either of you realizes it. So be rest assured a breakup is underway by the time you start seeing dating site ads on your newsfeed. You either tighten those loose ends or just click on the ads to try your luck with someone else.

Facebook does not predict your breakup based on the pictures you take with your lover or how frequently you communicate. Rather, it determines it based on your mutual friends and your relationship with your partner’s close friends. Facebook considers your relationship healthy if you and your partner have many mutual friends and if you are close to your partner’s close friends.

However, if you do not have many mutual friends and your partner is distant from your close friends, then there is a high probability your relationship is going down south. Facebook knows these sorts of relationships barely last for two months before fizzling out.^[9]

2 Your mouse cursor

If you use Facebook on your personal computer, then we should inform you that Facebook tracks your mouse cursor. During US Congress investigations into the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, Facebook revealed it tracks cursor movements to determine whether the user is a human or bot.^[10]

This would have been a very good excuse except that Facebook had revealed the truth a few years earlier, when it said it tracks our mouse cursor movements to determine the ads we clicked on and hover round. In one sentence, Facebook tracks our cursors to know the ads we are interested in.^[11]

1 Your lost and forgotten relatives

In 2017, Gizmodo writer, Kashmir Hill found a long lost relative after Facebook suggested he added her as a friend. They had no mutual friend, had different surnames and had not seen in 35 years and yet, Facebook somehow figured out they were related.

We already explained how this “people you may know” feature works in an earlier entry. However, it appears to be more sophisticated than we think.

Facebook does not only depend on your phone contacts and shadow profiles to suggest the people you may know. It also uses your location, facial recognition technology and even buys data from other apps. A psychiatrist once had Facebook recommending her patients to each other.

However, in what qualifies as nothing short of irony, Kashmir Hill was researching and experimenting to decode how the Facebook friend suggestion feature worked at the time Facebook recommended he added Rebecca Porter as a friend.

Ms. Porter was his great aunt. She married his grandfather’s brother a year after he was born and that was the only time they ever met. They had no mutual friends and lived far apart. She lived in Ohio while he lived in Florida.

Hill’s biological grandfather (who was called Porter) abandoned him when he was still a baby and he was later adopted by a man named Hill. This was where he got his surname, Hill. Thirty-five years later, Facebook linked him up with his great aunt.^[12]

Top 10 Disturbing Facts About Facebook