People Facebook knows

Jennifer Golbeck, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab and Professor at the University of Maryland, reports via Slate that these discarded thoughts don't completely disappear.

Instead Facebook uses a code that keeps track of every time you delete a would-be message and sends metadata about that message back to its own data bases.

A new research paper written by Facebookdata scientist Adam Kramer and Ph.D. student Sauvik Das examines the reasons for Facebook users' “self-censorship” and takes a look at millions of users' “aborted status updates, posts on other people's timelines, and comments on others' posts.”.

Facebook is keeping a record of all the data surrounding self-censored posts such as what time it was almost posted and whether it was set to be posted on a friend's page or on the user's own page.

Kramer and Das say that Facebook wants to understand all the reasons that people decide against posting because the company “loses value from the lack of content generation” every time a would-be post gets the axe.

Golbeck concludes that: “Facebook's desire to get users to post absolutely everything that comes into their heads is somewhat perverse because the company is essentially encouraging its users to lower the standards of what they share with their friends.

“So Facebook considers your thoughtful discretion about what to post as bad, because it withholds value from Facebook and from other users,” she writes. “Facebook monitors those unposted thoughts to better understand them, in order to build a system that minimizes this deliberate behavior.”