‘Facebook’ To Tighten Grasp On User Posts With ‘DeepText’

“Facebook” is already in the lives of over 222 million users in North America and Canada on a regular basis, with people constantly posting snippets of their daily activities without thinking about it. However, there have been some concerns recently when it comes to how the social media site has been using user data in order to generate profit. With the introduction of their new feature “DeepText,” the social network’s involvement in the personal lives of users has just gotten more entrenched.

“DeepText” is basically a deep-learning artificial intelligence that is capable of analyzing, categorizing, and then reacting to complex sentence structures conveyed as text. As such, it will have some involvement whenever a user posts something on their feed, writes on Messenger, or when searching for something while logged in.

As their post explains it, “DeepText” can do things like suggesting that a user call for an “Uber” based on a Messenger text that goes “I need a ride.” It can also decide which posts from users are most relevant to those who would be interested in them. Essentially, if a celebrity posts something on the social site, the AI will decide if the fan following the celebrity will want to read that post or not.

Naturally, this is expected to cause some concerns, particularly since the new feature will also be scanning the private messages of users via Messenger. “Facebook” has already been sued in the past for doing something like that, and now they want to go one step further.

A post by TechCrunch does point out an advantage however, which comes in the form of suppressing abusive and hateful posts, as well as weeding out users who are harassing others; whether or not this is enough to tip the scale in favor of “Facebook” in the court of public opinion is yet to be seen.