Facebook May Be Misreporting What Games You Play

Facebook’s games tend to have a surprisingly polarizing effect on the social network’s users. Many, of course, love them. Some even spend hours on end playing them. On the other hand, those that d...
Facebook May Be Misreporting What Games You Play
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  • Facebook’s games tend to have a surprisingly polarizing effect on the social network’s users. Many, of course, love them. Some even spend hours on end playing them. On the other hand, those that don’t play them tend to find them annoying – especially the notifications that tend to populate their newsfeed. Because if there’s one thing Facebook’s games love doing, it’s telling everybody which of their friends is playing.

    Now it looks like Facebook may not always be truthful when it tells you who’s playing what. According to a recent report in ZDNet, Facebook may be populating the “Discover New Games” section of their games page with recommendations that are, shall we say, less than accurate. This section of the page normally shows you a mix of the most popular games on Facebook, along with some of the games your friends play. According to the report, though, that information is sometimes outdated, and sometimes it’s outright wrong.

    Discover New Games that your friends may or may not be playing

    It seems that sometimes the page may show you games your friends have played in the past, but stopped playing months ago. Sometimes it shows you games they installed, but then uninstalled without playing. And sometimes, it tells you they’re playing games they never installed at all.

    I’ve contacted Facebook to ask for their comment on this issue, but haven’t heard back. Specifically, I asked what would be causing this to happen. Given the amount of money that Facebook makes on games, it’s easy to assign a sinister motivation to this: maybe Facebook is doing this on purpose to get more users into certain games by telling them their friends are playing. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that it’s just a glitch in the algorithm that Facebook uses to populate the “Discover new Games” section of the page.

    What do you think? Have you noticed this issue? Let us know int he comments.

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