In 2012, Facebook Altered Content To Tweak Readers' Emotions

The Atlantic reports that two years ago, Facebook briefly conducted an experiment on a subset of its users, altering the mix of content shown to them to emphasize content sorted by tone, negative or positive, and observe the results. From the Atlantic article: For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700,000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves. This tinkering was just revealed as part of a new study, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many previous studies have used Facebook data to examine “emotional contagion,” as this one did. This study is different because, while other studies have observed Facebook user data, this one set out to manipulate it. At least they showed their work.

Comments

Why I don't have a Facebook account

[sjbe]

This sort of thing is exactly why I have never signed up for an account. The lack of a moral compass at this company is profound.

Re:Why I don't have a Facebook account

[JustNiz]

it seems its pretty much the same for every other large US company too.

Ethical Responsibility

[forand]

This is quite interesting research that should never have been done. I am rather surprised that the National Academy published the results of a study which violated multiple ethical guidelines put in place to protect human subjects. Did Facebook track the number of suicides in the 700,000 sample? Was the rate of those given a sadder than average stream have a higher or lower rate? Do the Facebook researchers address the ethical questions posed by performing such an experiment at all?

Re:consent

[Sqr(twg)]

[citation needed]. Almost every major website does A/B_testing. Is there a law againt this? (That's not a rethorical question. I actually would like to know.)

Re:consent

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think this is about whether Facebook had a legal right to do this, but more on that in a minute. It's more about whether it was ethical on their part. Regardless, I think it clearly was not ethical for the researchers to do this study without getting the approval of the users who took part in the study.

Getting back to the legal issue, every site or app has a Terms of Services agreement. Does FB's TOS say that you might be randomly placed in a A/B test used for academic research purposes? If they don't, it seems to me that could be a legal issue.

Re:consent

[sribe]

They can do whatever they want, it's their site.

Did you think about that before you wrote it? If not, take a second and think about it.

There are many, many, many things they cannot do with their site.

Re:consent

[wisnoskij]

A psychological experiment cannot be called innocuous before the results are in. Who knows, maybe a extremely depressed person is 20 times more likely to commit suicide if they see that the world is 100% perfectly happy and positive.