• Gigaom, Tuesday, November 11, 2014 2:25 PM

GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram isn’t too excited about a new partnership that gives BuzzFeed access to Facebook’s “sentiment analysis” data in order to track shifting political opinions. Facebook’s data can be “distorted by a wide range of other factors, including the social ties between users,” Ingram writes. Yet “The biggest potential flaw in the BuzzFeed partnership is that the universe of behavior and sentiment that Facebook users are exposed to through the site is determined by Facebook’s algorithm -- in other words, the sentiment that BuzzFeed is trying to track is being influenced by the site itself, in thousands of tiny ways that may be difficult or even impossible to detect.”

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