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As an experiment, I hit the like button on the pages of a few Republican politicians and all of a sudden I found myself in a very different part of Facebook then I was used to.
Last week, I did something sort of weird. I made a brand-new Facebook profile.
Here’s my completely empty News Feed.
I added a profile picture and some personal information, like what college I went to and the fact that I work at BuzzFeed, and I put down that I was based in New York.
The News Feed is a tool for consuming not just news stories and memes that interest you, but also those that your friends like. Few people — if anyone — use Facebook the way I have. Your friends' interests and tastes have a tremendous effect on what you see. But I wanted to see how Facebook's recommendation algorithms worked in a purely friendless vacuum. What kind of content would it suggest if all it had to go on was what I liked, rather than who?
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