Maybe you've used text analytics methods to analyze free-form textual feedback? Here, we break down 5 key text analytics approaches, and share examples of how text analytics is used by businesses today. Plus, you'll also get the bonus Text Analytics Cheat Sheet! Download the e-book now and get the bonus Text Analytics Cheat Sheet, too!

In this file photo taken on March 21, 2018 A laptop showing the Facebook logo is held alongside a Cambridge Analytica sign at the entrance to the building housing the offices of Cambridge Analytica, in central London. LONDON – Britain's Information Commissioner has slapped Facebook with a fine of 500,000 pounds ($644,000) – the maximum possible – for its behavior in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The ICO's investigation found that between 2007 to 2014, Facebook processed the personal information of users unfairly by giving app developers access to their information without informed consent. The fine was the maximum allowed under the law at the time the breach occurred. Had the scandal taken place after new EU data protection rules went into effect, the amount would have been far higher.

Docked in Lewes, Delaware, is a 166-foot ship called the DELRIVER that is rarely called out of port. Nonetheless, it's staffed 24/7 by a four-person crew and stands ready for action at a moment's notice. The DELRIVER is an oil-spill response vessel, funded by the local oil industry to clean up spills in the Delaware Bay as soon as they happen. The last major spill in the area was in 2004, when the tanker Athos spewed 265,000 gallons of heavy crude from Venezuela into the Delaware River. The last spill of any kind that it responded to was a small diesel spill in 2014.

When Facebook announced at the end of September that it had suffered a data breach that ultimately affected 30 million accounts, it seemed, perhaps, like the work of sophisticated nation state hackers. But a new report from The Wall Street Journal suggests spammers as the culprit instead. That shouldn't make you feel that much better, though, given just how much damage criminals can do with the kind of information stolen from Facebook. It was, after all, a lot. The sophisticated daisy chain attack that the hackers pulled off garnered the names, phone numbers, and email of 15 million Facebook users.

BENGALURU, INDIA – Facebook has tentatively concluded that spammers looking to make money, and not a nation-state, were behind the largest-ever data theft at the social media company, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday. The people behind the attack were a group of Facebook and Instagram spammers who present themselves as a digital marketing company and whose activities were previously known to Facebook's security team, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the company's internal investigation. Last week, Facebook said cyberattackers had stolen data from 29 million Facebook accounts using an automated program that moved from one friend to the next, adding that the data theft had hit fewer than the 50 million profiles it initially reported. Facebook said in an email that it was cooperating with the Federal Bureau of Investigation on this matter. The breach has left users more vulnerable to targeted phishing attacks and could deepen unease about posting to a service whose privacy, moderation and security practices have been called into question by a number of scandals, cybersecurity experts and financial analysts have said.

More than two weeks after Facebook revealed a massive data breach, we still don't know who was using the flaw in its site to access information on tens of millions of users. Now the Wall Street Journal reports, based on anonymous sources, that the company believes spammers perpetrated the hack in an attempt to make money via deceptive advertising. Facebook eventually said that about 30 million people actually had their login tokens stolen (you can see if your account was among them by checking this page), and said that the attackers took account details and contact information. Still, the paper said "internal researchers" believe the people behind it are existing Facebook and Instagram spammers who claim to run a "digital marketing company." The lines between misinformation spread by nation-state sponsored trolls, shady analytics companies and spammers chasing trendy topics to make a buck have become increasingly blurred in recent years, so it's difficult to know if this adds up or if we'll ever know who exactly stole the information and where it ended up.

See what was stolen from all those Facebook accounts. SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook believes spammers, not a nation state, were behind the data breach of 30 million accounts, according to a published report. The spammers aimed to make money through deceptive advertising and masqueraded as a digital marketing company, people familiar with the company's internal investigation told the Wall Street Journal. Facebook has declined to say who was behind the hack, which was the worst security breach in its history. Reached for comment by USA TODAY on Wednesday night, Facebook pointed to last week's statement from Guy Rosen, vice president of product management.

Facebook has revealed 30m accounts were affected in a data breach last month. The company said hackers were able to access personal information for nearly half of those accounts. That information included name, relationship status, religion, birthdate, workplaces, search activity, and recent location check-ins. The company had initially said 50m accounts were affected. According to Facebook VP of Product Management Guy Rosen, attackers were able to access name and contact information for half of the hacked accounts.

Today, Facebook provided additional information on the data breach it disclosed last month. Whereas it initially said up to 50 million users might have been affected, it now reports that 30 million were impacted by the breach. By exploiting a system vulnerability, attackers were able to steal digital keys called access tokens from those 30 million users, and Facebook has now laid out how those users were affected. The company is also notifying those impacted, but if you don't want to wait to be notified, you can check if your account was affected through this link. The 30 million users whose access tokens were stolen fall into one of three categories.

In "How to Make a Racist AI Without Really Trying," Robyn Speer shows how to build a simple sentiment analysis system, using standard, well-known sources for word embeddings (GloVe and word2vec), and a widely used sentiment lexicon. Her program assigns "negative" sentiment to names and phrases associated with minorities, and "positive" sentiment to names and phrases associated with Europeans. Even a sentence like "Let's go get Mexican food" gets a much lower sentiment score than "Let's go get Italian food." That result isn't surprising, nor are Speer's conclusions: if you take a simplistic approach to sentiment analysis, you shouldn't be surprised when you get a program that embodies racist, discriminatory values. It's possible to minimize algorithmic racism (though possibly not eliminate it entirely), and Speer discusses several strategies for doing so.