Artificial Intelligence in Practice

6Facebook: Using Artificial Intelligence To Improve Social Media Services

Facebook is a US-based, multinational social media and social networking company. It has been a part of the fabric of modern-day life for over a decade now. Around 2.2 billion¹ people use the Facebook social media platform to keep up to date with friends and family, arrange their social lives, find local businesses and, of course, share pictures of their pets with the world.

Every time any one of us uses Facebook we generate data – what we are doing, where we are, who we are with. Before social media, we didn't have anywhere to upload the 136,000 images per minute we currently add to Facebook, let alone the 510,000 comments and 293,000 status updates.²

All that data is great training fodder for artificial intelligence (AI), too – and the company has launched a number of tools and projects that put machine learning in the service of its users.

How Does Facebook Use Artificial Intelligence?

Facebook uses its AI engine, FBLearner Flow, to personalize users’ news feeds and homepages, putting information (and advertising) in front of them, which it believes they will find useful or of interest.³

It uses machine learning to analyze and segment the platform's billions of users, generally according to information the users provide themselves – where they live, work, who they are friends with, where they travel to, what they search for online and what their signals (such as “likes” and “shares”) suggest about ...