Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) set a new record of over 1 billion interactions, all thanks to this year’s World Cup games. The event ignited more actions on a social media platform than any other event in history.
Facebook interaction records broken
Facebook shared the news of the milestone reached over the weekend. Over 220 million of the site’s users left posts, comments and likes regarding the tournament, which began in mid-June. Over 31 million users engaged in 75 million posts all related to Saturday’s game between Brazil and Chile. Brazilian soccer players were another hot topic on Facebook. That level of online activity on Facebook regarding the World Cup was second to only the 140 million interactions engaged by 58 million during the opening match between Brazil and Croatia.
The social network giant shared a blog post on Monday in regards to the news. The company explained that it sees a lot of user interaction on sporting events but nothing like what was seen over this year’s World Cup. The site’s data editors have never seen interaction at such epic levels.
Facebook involved in controversial project
In other Facebook-related news, the website recently got in trouble for a controversial project. A recent report unveiled the experiment Facebook conducted on user feeds. Researchers tweaked the site’s algorithms and studied up on 700,000 user posts, and it was discovered that emotional states can be transmitted between two people without face-to-face interaction. Researchers analyzed over 3 million posts which contained a total of 122 million words. The researchers then analyzed the language using an algorithm to decipher whether the language was negative or positive. The data team then tweaked the number of positive or negative posts on user news feeds to gauge reactions.
Researchers then discovered that when users found fewer positive posts in their news feeds, they could be likely to produce more negative posts. Not surprisingly, the opposite was found true for users who found frequent negative posts in their feeds.
