eli5 How does machine learning work to predict human action/behaviour on social media?

Question

For example, how can it determine how likely I am to like use certain content/buy certain things (and is this different from algorithms?)?

In: 8

Answer 1

If people who are similar to you like a thing, then you will probably like the thing as well. It turns out that you can guess a lot of things about a person, with high accuracy, based on the Facebook pages that a person likes/follows.