One of the reasons why Facebook is so beloved by advertisers is because the social networking giant has access to all sorts of granular data about your background and interests. All the more interesting is that Facebook even has a good idea as to your political leanings, even if you rarely, if ever, “like” or express an interest in a particular candidate or political cause.
Interestingly enough, there’s an extremely simple way to see what side of the political spectrum Facebook thinks you fall on. It all goes back to advertising dollars, after all, so you better believe that Facebook has a good inclination as to whether or not you’re on the Trump bandwagon or if your heart still beats proudly for Bernie Sanders.
Even if you think you’ve done a good job when it comes to keeping your political views hidden from public view, it’s hard to escape the all-knowing Facebook algorithm.
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Per The New York Times, figuring out “how Facebook has categorized you — as very liberal or very conservative, or somewhere in between” is a relatively straight forward affair.
All you have to do is log-in to Facebook and then hop on over to facebook.com/ads/preferences. Next, go to the “Interests” section where you’ll see a number of sub-categories. From there, click on the “Lifestyle and culture” option and keep an eye out for a box called US Politics. Once you find that, you’ll see your political designation (according to Facebook) located in parentheses.
Expectedly, the possible designations include, liberal, very liberal, moderate, conservative and very conservative.
How does Facebook figure this out when it comes to who those prefer to keep their politics to themselves? Facebook obviously isn’t divulging any details, but it stands to reason that the company makes educated guesses based on a user’s interests, drawing correlations between items that can reasonably be associated with a specific political orientation.
