The author of a peer-reviewed study says ‘yes it can’ and if he’s right, it has frightening implications
Three things about the research paper stopped me in my tracks. The first was the title: Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images. The second was that the author was Michal Kosinski, someone who used to be at Cambridge University, is now at Stanford and whose work I’ve followed for years. And the third was that it was published in Scientific Reports, one of the journals published by the Nature group and definitely not an outlet for nonsense.
The paper reports a research project that suggests that facial recognition technology can accurately infer individuals’ political orientation in terms of whether they have liberal or conservative views. A common (and open-source) facial recognition algorithm was applied to images of more than a million individuals drawn from their entries on Facebook or dating websites to predict their political orientation by comparing their similarity to faces of liberal and conservative others. Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of liberal–conservative face pairs, which is significantly better than chance (50%), human accuracy (55%) or even one provided by a 100-item personality questionnaire (66%).
