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Issues

Facebook quizzes are a means for people to get hold of some of your personal Facebook information. They also tend to be at least a little misinformed, in parts, because there is no “quality control” to ensure degree of correctness to answers presented. There are also trends of prejudices seen in some of them which are subtle and can gently brainwash the many people taking them.

Why you should care

Your information is at stake if you take them, or just even click on them to view more of an answer of the quizzes taken by your friends, to be able to talk to them about it fully.

You might subject yourself to some misinformation and likely bias if the “answers” were misleading, and often they are. It’s not so much the “wrong facts” as biased, often oversimplified views expressed for the joy of the quiz , that will do more harm to you. Worse, that would have greater impact on kids who might not know enough of life to recognize them. Don’t kid yourself that adults do much better, though.

Time “wasted” might have just downgraded to time wasted and brainwashed, even if only subtly. You might learn something in the process, like a profile of a historical person, but is getting the wrong impression of them “education”, especially if it were deliberately or maliciously wrong? Is a chuckle really worth all that?

You might have just broadcast some less than true or unpleasant impression of yourself to your friends. That could extend others looking in on your profile from corporate snooping or profiling (see notes here). It might be subtle, see detailed examples below, but it might not be good, either.

What can you do about it?

Minimize the number of quizzes you take, if not outright stop. If you really want to know something about yourself, try a real test like one of many great ones at Queendom.com

You might also consider stopping to read results by your friends on your Newsfeed all together unless you were to critically assess it for a reason like I had in creating this post. I generally just do the “Hide quiz” option so I never see it again when a quiz results comes on my Newsfeed, but there are so many quizzes out there I have to do it daily!

Stop the information sharing! As long as you still have those applications, they are still potentially able to get information from you. It’s too late to stop what might have been taken, but you don’t have to keep giving, either.

  • Go into your Settings near the upper left of your Facebook profile.
  • Choose Application settings.
  • Click the X to the right of any application settings you don’t want. Generally, you can’t eliminate the default ones like Photos and Notes. The other ones you have the options so it’s up to you.

Get past quiz results off your Wall. Check your Wall in case taking some quizzes off your Applications list didn’t remove their outcomes on your Wall.

If you want to know more specifics about why you should be concerned with Facebook quizzes, please read on.

If you see examples of prejudice in the Facebook quiz results, please do share as a Comment at the end!

Privacy

In using an application, which includes all quizzes, you give up information to the developers. Anyone who knows how to create applications, or has the means to pay someone to do it, can create a Facebook quiz these days. There is no screening process I’m aware of, though I’m sure if you posted something blatantly offensive, it’d be dealt with. But how would you know if the person/s you were giving up your information to were trustworthy? Obviously, it’s a question that hardly phases anybody given how often people take all kinds of quizzes. However, I ask you these things:

  • Do you think you might have taken some quizzes if each time you were about to take a quiz, a real picture and profile of the developer/s showed up?
  • Where would you draw the line?
  • How bad or creepy a picture would stop you?
  • What would their jobs be that might stop you?
  • Would knowing where they lived stop you?
  • What if they had to declare what information they were able to get from you and what they would do with it, would certain answers stop you?

I doubt very many people would say “no” to all those questions. I wish Facebook would install some of those features. It’d be real interesting to see the outcomes, although it would cost Facebook way too much advertising revenue to ever dare.

There are now applications where you can create your own quizzes, even if just to share with your friends. “How well do you know me” types of quizzes are the perfect examples. As you surf mindlessly on the Net, you probably forget or ignore the fact someone else had created the application which you’d have to use to take your friend’s quiz. They are getting your information, with the aid of your friend, no less! If you were to act that out in real life, which real life Facebook can be quite humorous as the video below shows, you’d probably call that developer person a very nasty one!

Prejudices

If you were a developer trying to get information from quizzes, you’d try to think of ones which give a little chuckle at the end. You’d probably minimize the research you’d have to do by choosing either topics you know a little something about. It’s not serious, after all. People don’t come to Facebook for a dose of reality! It’s escapism! So you’re probably going to tone things down a bit, probably by spinning it a bit, if anything ever sounded “harsh” or “too serious”. After all, it’s meant to be a good chuckle or laugh, not therapy! And it’s not like people are going to check on you like with Wikipedia, given you own your quiz. It’s self-sourced information, but not open-source critiques.

But if developers relied on their views without checking many facts or leaving them out, or smooth over the nuances that can’t be put into facts like personalities of historical figures, who’s to say the results aren’t a little biased? We’re all at least a little prejudiced, as the video below from the musical Avenue Q parodies so well. Quick.  Tell me what you think a developer’s personality would be like.

  • Did you just think up a geek image?
  • Did you just think of someone who maybe should get out more?
  • Aside from your own prejudices of a stereotypical image, are they the people you think are knowledgeable about life?
  • Would you think highly of their abilities to know about certain subjects, especially people and personalities?

If you had answers to the questions in the Privacy discussion above, do you think you would, more often than not, have faith in the accuracy of their quizzes? Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to put all developers into that category. I’d be hypocritical to do prejudice myself in talking about that. I’m sure there are many good developers doing good quizzes for the right reasons, but I doubt it’s anywhere near the majority from what I’ve seen of Facebook quizzes.

Now, what type of prejudices am I talking about? Any kind could happen, but the one I often see is sexism. This is probably because I have friends who avoid more sketchy sounding quizzes, for the most part. Often, in the results of quizzes involving historical figures, women are poorly portrayed, even if subtly. One result at a time, you probably don’t recognize it. But if they flash across your Newsfeed often enough, you start to see trend. By far, the biggest “trend” I’ve seen is that it seems any woman who has succeeded has had to use her sexuality and what’s between her legs to achieve it. Of course, it’s not blatantly said that way, but it’s not far. Take this description of outcomes for Elizabeth I.

In your past life you were Queen Elizabeth I. In this life you continue to have strong relationships with friends, have a conservative disposition, use your sexuality to gain power, and are careful to not take sides.

Elizabeth I is generally accepted to be a Fieldmarshall (ENTJ) Myers-Briggs personality type. She takes sides, all right! And she wipes out the other one! But she’s also known as the Virgin Queen. Her virginity no one knows for sure but using sexuality to gain power is not how I would describe her leadership. I would recommend the movies of her life as a quick reference, but less glamorous historical accounts in books are even better.

Oh, by the way, you just broadcast to your friends you don’t take sides and so you probably sleep with all sides to make sure you get what you really want in life and advance yourself. Seems like that’s the only way you know how to as well! Niiiiice! What’s the word for those types of women?

Or try this description for Cleopatra:

The original Samantha (of Sex in the City), your ability to seduce lies not only in your physical beauty, but the power of your will. You have no compuctions using your sexuality to attract those in power, not only for your own pleasure, but to protect your interests.

Cleopatra as a character from Sex in the City??? That’s a great ploy to use a cheap analogy so people would “get it” very quickly, but puh-sleaze!!! And yes, the spelling error on “compuctions” was part of the quiz result. Quality control, indeed! And you’re even a worse whatever you answered for the type of woman Elizabeth was in my question a few paragraphs earlier! That’s real hot to show your friends, and maybe employers or potential colleges profiling you, isn’t it?

Now I don’t know that much about Cleopatra, with recorded history being more sparse at the time than for Elizabeth over 1500 years later, but I’ll tell you one thing. Most men couldn’t achieve anything close what either did as a woman in those women’s places, even with the best of both worlds, i.e. as a sexy woman with the tremendous benefits of males in positions of power in those days. Those women had a lot more going for them than their sexual appeal, including intelligence, diplomacy, ability to read people, patience or whatever else. Sexuality will only get you so far, and that’s no where near far enough for what these women were able to do. I would even argue that, at least for Elizabeth, sexuality was a non-influential factor in what she did in her life and reign that built her immortal legacy.

But how many of these sexist comments does some teens, and adults, have to see before it’s reinforced in their minds it’s true?

And do you think people who say they don’t take any of this seriously can really ignore it as well as they claim? Where do you think any of your stereotypes come from? It’s not like most people attend Stereotype 101 class or read books of stereotypes to learn them. They get them in subtle ways of life and cultural interatcions, mostly, and adults are not much less prone to it than children. I don’t know of any statistics saying adults were less racist than children. If anything, I’d bet money on the opposite!

Now I’m not a woman to comment on the most damning sources of sexism, but I’m an ethnic minority. It’s prejudice of a different kind, if you will, but I don’t think it’s too different in how it works to spread. As an ethnic minority, I can tell you it’s similar  small and subtle incidents of racism which are most damning and hardest to challenge. That’s because they are not so obvious and it takes a huge amount of text like above to even make a point. They are difficult to recognize, but by frequency and lack of resistance, they get engrained the deepest. For those reasons, I’m concerned and, frankly, disappointed in how Facebook chooses to let them run rampant with so few checks.

But that’s enough of that heavy stuff. Let’s end with that fun song promised above, though a fun song with some excellent points!

Other Facebook issue posts on my site:

How to Get Rid of Your Facebook Past

25 Things For Facebook You Can’t Steal My ID With

25 Things You Gave on Facebook to Help Get Your ID Stolen

Una Guía de Netiqueta Práctica para Facebook

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 8.7