Although many users tend to distinguish between what happens online from what happens IRL (in real life), the data that is generated from their use of social media—from posting reactions to the season finale of a show to liking photos from Saturday night out—is generated from life outside the Internet. In other words, Facebook data is IRL data. And it is only increasing as people live their lives more and more on their phones and on the Internet. This means that, for an analyst, there’s often no need to ask questions: You simply create algorithms that find discrete patterns in a user’s
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