Facebook is launching yet another new application: Forecast. With it, it is not a question of a new social network or a new way of communicating, but of predicting the future. The concept is intriguing, but rest assured, Facebook has not started to boast.
Forecast, developed by the epic NPE of Facebook, wants to make predictions based on consensus. In fact, multiple choice questions are asked of users regarding the news, in order to infer trends. In this period of health crisis, Forecast is particularly interested in the coronavirus.
By answering the questions, participants can create discussions to deepen the subject and share articles about it. For example on the estimated date of marketing of a future vaccine against COVID-19. They can also suggest their own questions to the moderators of the app.
The application is currently only available to healthcare professionals and certain academics by invitation. However, here, it is not a question of proving a hypothesis scientifically but of electing the most "popular" answer.
Access still limited
Currently, Forecast is only available in the United States and Canada, on iOS to a very limited and selected audience, therefore. On the other hand, predictions concerning the coronavirus based on the responses of privileged participants are public and available on the Forecast website.
Mark Zuckerberg's company presents its new app as a simple opinion research tool, but we can still wonder about the interest that the giant Facebook has in offering such a tool. The American company has recently been the target of numerous criticisms concerning its management of the spread of fake news on its platforms concerning the Covid-19. Proposing an application based on people's assumptions and opinions is not necessarily the best idea or the best time.
As a creation of Facebook's NPE research and development team, Forecast may only be offered to a small number of users and even close within a few weeks. It all depends on the success it will have among the users, but also on their return.
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- Mobile app
- Application
- High-Tech
- Deconfinement
- IOS
- Covid 19
- Coronavirus
- Near future
- To come up