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Facebook's Emotion Experiment: Too Far, Or Social Network Norm?
Facebook's recently disclosed 2012 experiment in altering the tone of what its users saw in their newsfeeds has brought it plenty of negative opinions to chew on. Here's one, pointed out by an anonymous reader: Facebook's methodology raises serious ethical questions. The team may have bent research standards too far, possibly overstepping criteria enshrined in federal law and human rights declarations. "If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that's experimentation," says James Grimmelmann, a professor of technology and the law at the University of Maryland. "This is the kind of thing that would require informed consent."
For a very different take on the Facebook experiment, consider this defense of it from Tal Yarkoni, who thinks the criticism it's drawn is "misplaced": Given that Facebook has over half a billion users, it’s a foregone conclusion that every tiny change Facebook makes to the news feed or any other part of its websites induces a change in millions of people’s emotions. Yet nobody seems to complain about this much–presumably because, when you put it this way, it seems kind of silly to suggest that a company whose business model is predicated on getting its users to use its product more would do anything other than try to manipulate its users into, you know, using its product more. ... [H]aranguing Facebook and other companies like it for publicly disclosing scientifically interesting results of experiments that it is already constantly conducting anyway–and that are directly responsible for many of the positive aspects of the user experience–is not likely to accomplish anything useful. If anything, it’ll only ensure that, going forward, all of Facebook’s societally relevant experimental research is done in the dark, where nobody outside the company can ever find out–or complain–about it."
Just don't use social networking.
It's all perfectly harmless. CTos is here for you! For those that haven't played the game, stop reading. With that one of the points in the game was "targeted reassignment" of vote predictions to get a mayor re-elected.
Om, nomnomnom...
it doesn't sound like this is the first experiment done by the facebook crowd -> What other experiments happened? Were the participants informed about it later? Who takes the blame if such an experiment results in someone getting hurt?
I love how overblown the coverage of this has been..as if it's driven people to suicide. It's their site, they can do what they want; people are free to leave if they want. Nothing to see here.
It was too far when they were selling the data before these shenanigans but most people do not care/uninformed/clueless.
Congratulations FB has reached a new level of indecency. Given that it's so regular it's no longer alarming, somehow.
Not really, not in the least bit should anyone be surprised. Some years ago when Zuckerburg was asked about facebook users data, his reply; they are fucking idiots to trust him.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
This is "social", the fucking pox of the internet, we are talking about here: "too far" and "social network norm" are usually synonymous...
In a way, though, the fact that it doesn't go even further too far helps make it pathetic: what happens on 'social' services are the ethical transgressions of our best and brightest, equipped with nigh-unlimited funds, the assurance that they are Just That Good, and that 'disruption' is the ultimate virtue, and yet their imaginations seem to extend no further than being bigger assholes about selling ads...
Bullshit. How do you know that you don't know anyone that was affected by it? Do you know which week in 2012 the experiment was conducted? Do you know which of the ~billion FB accounts were the 700k experimented upon? I find it pretty shocking that so many people are having difficulty understanding the difference between A/B testing and intentional emotional manipulation where a significant negative (or positive) result was the data point the study strove to measure.
I can quite imagine that a significant number of offline lives were impacted by this experiment. People exposed to negative content presumably don't limit their negative reactions to behavior only in the venue where they were exposed to the negative content.
Seriously, come on. Do you PERSONALLY know ANYONE who was affected by this? Neither do I.
Do you PERSONALLY know anyone who was affected by warrantless wire tapping? Neither do I.
As long as they never admit who it happened to, so that nobody can know whether it happened to them, then we're good? Look, there probably isn't anyone alive today (and certainly not on thus website) who knew Little Albert but that doesn't make the experiment that was done to him any less unethical.
Facebook's TOS can obtain consent, but it can never obtain informed consent.
I understand why this should be considered wrong and fully understand users who don't want to have someone (less some company!) playing with their feelings.
But on the other hand, considering that creating an emotional response has been a standard marketing tool for the last 20 years, how is this different from regular A/B-Testing? 50% of your website users will see a slightly altered version of your website, and you compare response rates to the users receiving the "old" or "original" website.
Advertisers are manipulating our feelings for decades.News outlets have been doing it to an extent it became part of the news format itself (I guess anyone who was watching tv news last night saw that light-hearted, cozy, human-intrest or slightly oddball or cute item concluding the broadcast, right?) While creating negative feelings toward someone else has always been used in political campaigns.
It even becomes less spectacular if you consider, that on facebook, there always has been a selection algorithm in place, that tried to select those items from all your facebook-sources, that might keep your intrest focused onto facebook. Without selection, your facebook would scroll past like the Star Wars end titles. Only the parameters of the selection have been fine tuned, as they probably are at each facebook server update. It would be some new quality if that selection had been "objective" before, but being "personal" and emotional instead, is what kept us at facebook already.
So this is old news. But it should be a wake-up call: WAKE UP, THIS IS OLD NEWS! PEOPLE ARE TRYING TO MANIPULATE YOUR FEELINGS FOR AGES!
Just in case you haven't noticed. I'm surprised about the number of people who are surprised.
bickerdyke
So it was done, but nobody was affected by it? Sounds like something they would have cancelled if it wasnt having any effect on people.
I find it pretty shocking that so many people are having difficulty understanding the difference between A/B testing and intentional emotional manipulation where a significant negative (or positive) result was the data point the study strove to measure.
Creating an emotional response is part of marketing and therefore webdesign.
Of course you're not directly monitoring emotions as a data point during A/B-Tests. You measure e.g. the clicks, pages read or the time spent on the website. But every marketing guy worth its money could tell you that you can increase all of that by "making the user feel at home".
bickerdyke
What about what advertisers do every day?
Our government (for us Americans) runs campaigns to alter opinions in other countries.
I'd like to everyone in the business of "caus[ing] changes in psychological status" get "require informed consent" first.
Beer companies anyone?
"If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that's experimentation,"
No it isn't, otherwise the above sentence would be experimentation, as it changed my psychological state from calm to annoyed. Is it too much to ask that supposed experts use their own jargon correctly?
The impetus for the study was an age-old complaint of some Facebook users: That going on Facebook and seeing all the great and wonderful things other people are doing makes people feel bad about their own lives.
So although conventional wisdom might say that seeing positive things makes you happier, here there have been accusations to the contrary -- positive things about other people makes you feel lousy about yourself. This study ostensibly looked at that (and I think it found something along the lines of conventional wisdom: happy posts make you post happy stuff, a [dubious!] proxy for your own happines...).
If Facebook knew (and how would they?) that X makes you depressed, then yes...there might be some moral issues with that. But it seems that Facebook asked a legitimate question -- especially so given that it was published in PNAS.
That said, yeah...it feels a little shady. But then, when I log onto Facebook, I am certainly not expecting any aspect of the website to be designed with my best interests in mind!
Advertising frequently uses psychological pressure (for example, appealing to feelings of inadequacy) on the intended consumer, which may be harmful.
Criticism of advertising
...was my 1st thought when reading...
"If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that's experimentation," says James Grimmelmann, a professor of technology and the law at the University of Maryland. "This is the kind of thing that would require informed consent."
One could argue that advertising is not always done with informed consent.
It is hard to understand how this passed an ethics board when harm to users was a predictable outcome. Increased rates of self harm and suicide are realistic prospects when you deliberately try to make people unhappy.
They are constantly screwing around with everything else, breaking this, fixing that, changing this, etc. I don't find it surprising that Facebook would look at this as a social experiment and neglect to consider the human emotion manipulation element. However, it is telling that this sort of thing goes on, and if anyone is shocked or offended by this, then they might want to invest their time and energy in another form of social media. I hear G+ is nice.
Given that Facebook has over half a billion users, it’s a foregone conclusion that every tiny change Facebook makes to the news feed or any other part of its websites induces a change in millions of people’s emotions. Yet nobody seems to complain about this much...
If this guy actually thinks nobody complains about this much then he isn't paying attention. However putting that aside his argument is a straw man. There is a VERY significant difference between changing a service and that change having an emotional impact versus actually experimenting on the emotions of your customers directly and without their permission without even so much as review by an independent review board. Anyone who can't comprehend the difference between the two has a pretty big ethical blind spot. The fact that Facebook seems to be genuinely surprised by this response tells me everything I need to know about how they regard their users. They see them the same way an entomologist sees bugs - something to be cataloged and experimented on but not worthy of the respect one normally gives other human beings.
–presumably because, when you put it this way, it seems kind of silly to suggest that a company whose business model is predicated on getting its users to use its product more would do anything other than try to manipulate its users into, you know, using its product more
There is a big and fairly bright line between observing users behavior given certain stimuli as a natural experiment and the experimental investigators manipulating those users directly without their permission in a designed experiment. The later generally requires informed consent for a variety of very sensible reasons relating to ethics. The fact that emotional manipulation is done in other contexts is utterly irrelevant. That's the same argument children make when they claim that "...but all my friends are doing it too". I suppose since Facebook is owned and run by an immature child billionaire that I shouldn't be surprised.
And no, the Facebook terms of use does NOT rise to the level of informed consent.
I'm a postdoc at university, though not in a field in which you usually study human behavior. Anyway, if I experminted on humans without their prior consent, I'd loose my job. In every application for a project that involves studies on animals or humans there is an ethics form to fill out, and I must wonder how they got funding without cheating in one of those forms.
Lying to tests subjects is to some extent necessary, of course, or otherwise research in pschology would be almost impossible. However, conducting experiments on humans without their prior consent is unethical. Everybody knows that. Whoever conducted this study needs to be investigated by an ethics committee.
My 2 cents.
Facebook didn't simply set out to make tweaks and see how users responded; they setup a controlled experiment on subjects without their consent; a practice that appears to violate ethical and possibly legal guidelines for behavioral research. I agree it could push them to continue to do such research and not reveal it; but when it inevitably leaks that they are doing that it will create a PR nightmare. Facebook could have simply asked people to opt in to the study and provide the standard information regarding the study and this would be a non-issue. For those looking for info on humane research protection guidelines in the US google Office of Human Research Protection.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
It goes the other way too, & I said all I had to about that here in this exchange -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
* It's VERY easy to 'sway people' & their emotions based on what their environs shows them (in sounds, what you see, & yes - what you read too!).
Psychology & Psychiatry are the MOST dangerous 'sciences' & imo, least understood (statistics & shrinks notwithstanding) - however, parts of what we DO know, does actually work... this is one of them (& any media you consume is an avenue to that).
APK
P.S.=> Makes me wonder sometimes what the 'end goal' of such emotional manipulation is on the parts of those practicing it - it can be "for the absolute good" or "the absolute bad" is all - instead of using it for "the bad" why NOT use it, for the "good" (relative terms of course, but I think most normal folks here catch my drift on this account)... apk
Facebook defense is similar to NSA defense. Makes one wonder if they are run by the same (type of) people.
What about what advertisers do every day?
What about them? They don't get to run controlled experiments on me and they certainly do not get to alter what I say or how others receive what I say. Advertisers can control what they say to me and see how I react but they don't get to manipulate what I say and see how that affects others. HUGE difference.
Our government (for us Americans) runs campaigns to alter opinions in other countries.
They don't get to adjust what *I* say to see what effect it has on others. You really can't see the difference?
I'd like to everyone in the business of "caus[ing] changes in psychological status" get "require informed consent" first.
When they are performing a controlled experiment on me then yes they should. If they want to simply send messages my way to see what I do, then that does not require informed consent unless it rises to a certain level of obnoxiousness like telemarketing. They do not get blanket permission to interrupt my day, manipulated what I say or manipulate how others receive what I say.
> "If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that's experimentation,"
That's any and all communications ever made by anyone to anyone else through any platform ever.
I don't fucking care, just show me the items in my feed, that means everyone I'm subscribed to, in the order they were posted.
There is no other acceptable answer and any automated rearrangement is unacceptable.
But on the other hand, considering that creating an emotional response has been a standard marketing tool for the last 20 years, how is this different from regular A/B-Testing?
Because they aren't just throwing messages at people to see how they react. They were actively changing the messages and how they were received. HUGE difference and one that crosses an ethical line. If you are a beer company, you can try to promote your product to me in a way that you think might make me more inclined to buy it and that is fine as long as you aren't overly intrusive about it (think telemarketers). What is NOT fine is for them to take what I say and manipulate that to try to convince me (or others) to buy their product.
Just in case you haven't noticed. I'm surprised about the number of people who are surprised.
Then you do not understand what is going on. Facebook stepped over an ethical line in their "research". No, nobody got (badly) hurt but that doesn't make it acceptable. Screwing around with people's emotions in a controlled experiment should require at minimum review by a genuinely independent ethical review board and probably genuine informed consent. Facebook could be bothered with neither one. They seem to regard their users as insects to be manipulated and dissected.
Seriously, come on. Do you PERSONALLY know ANYONE who was affected by this? Neither do I.
TFS and TFA should include something like: This news brought to you by our scaremongering overlords, courtesy of privacy nutjobs all over the globe.
This isn't legal documents we're talking about here, anyway. I'm also pretty sure this is covered under Facebook's EULA/TOS you didn't read.
Life goes on. Don't like Facebook, don't use Facebook.
I also don't personally know anyone that was killed in the Holocaust. I guess that's ok to then?
The point is, Facebook could very easily manipulate elections with this sort of thing. It should be illegal. I'm aware that lots of other companies have done the same sorts of things to lesser degrees, but that doesn't make it right. If it were illegal, at least the researchers involved might think twice about participating.
I don't know about anyone else, but my feed is usually full of people complaining, arguing, or just pissed off. I always thought this was the norm for FB. IÃ(TM)d hate to think I know this many unhappy people.
For real, THIS issue bothers FB users? I'm speechless, you never know what's going going to matter to someone.
1. Look up what wacky crimes were committed in January 2012.
2. Blame them on Facebook.
3. Sue.
4. Profit!.
In January 2012 a bunch of kids formed the Islamic Caliphate of the Rusted Chevy on Cinder Blocks on my front lawn, despite their parents instructing them: "You best be staying away from Mr. Kid, he ain't right in the head. "
Obviously Facebook manipulation caused this.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The problem is not that they attempted to create an emotional response or manipulate people's emotions. As people are constantly pointing out advertisers so that all the time. People don't seem to grasp that there is a large difference between this and advertising.
The problem is the way it was done. People use facebook with the expectation that they are seeing a (reasonably) objective representation of what their friends are trying to express or convey. Facebook is the equivalent of the telephone in a telephone call. If the telephone somehow manipulated what you heard to make your friend sound more negative or positive without changing their core meaning that would be unethical without informed consent, just as this is.
A more extreme version would be facebook subtly modifying the content of what your friends post as it appears to you without anyone knowing it was doing this. That would be even more unethical. The problem is mirepresentation, the method by which they attempt to manipulate emotions.
So Skulldilocks threw acid on the schoolchildrens' faces, cause somebody from the bible told her to do it!
Seriously, come on. Do you PERSONALLY know ANYONE who was affected by this? Neither do I.
Nobody knows who was affected or exactly how. That's part of the problem. They did it without knowledge or consent. They did not inform people of what they were doing or the fact that they did it after the fact. They did not have their design of experiment reviewed by an independent ethics board. They violated the (misplaced) trust their users had to deliver their messages as the users intended.
This isn't legal documents we're talking about here, anyway. I'm also pretty sure this is covered under Facebook's EULA/TOS you didn't read.
NOTHING in Facebook's TOS remotely qualifies as informed consent to be experimented upon. I don't even have to read it to know that. It's not THAT they did this experiment, it is HOW they did this experiment. It's not hard to check the experiment proposal in front of an ethics panel. It's not hard to get informed consent if that is deemed appropriate by the ethics panel. It is standard practice to do those things for some very very good reasons. Facebook couldn't be bothered.
Think for yourself. Don't rely on some social network site to think for you or influence the way you think. Leave the flock and quit being a sheep.
Sad but true. Then again, 99.9999999% of the users still wouldn't read the EULA even if they had to pay millions, so they still could get away with it.
Do you know which week in 2012 the experiment was conducted?
Yes, because I actually read the paper.
I also don't personally know anyone that was killed in the Holocaust. I guess that's ok to then?
Facebook filters some users already filtered feeds slightly differently to lower the chance of positive/negative messages appearing => killing millions of people in absolutely horrendous ways. Good lord.
The thing is that is exactly what just about every advertiser does all the time.
No it is NOT the same thing. The beer company does not have any control over what *I* say and they do not get to (legally) change what I say or how it is delivered to others. There is a HUGE difference between putting a message out there and seeing how people react to it versus actually changing what you or I say and how it is delivered to someone else without my consent. The former is advertising which is fine as long as it isn't too intrusive. The later is a violation of personal sovereignty unless you obtain informed consent beforehand.
Furthermore even if every advertiser actually did this (which they do not) and you have an ethical blind spot so large that you can't actually see what Facebook did wrong, two wrongs don't make a right. "Everyone else is doing it" is a juvenile argument that little kids make to justify behaviors that they shouldn't be engaging in.
I talked to several (non-tech) friends about this, and they were more upset about Facebook "censoring" out posts than the emotional manipulation. In their minds, Facebook allows everything to be shown, but certain topics gain preference due to likes or dislikes. However, they will show you everything if you scroll far enough.
Their outrage came from the thought that FB was removing "happy" content from their feed. (That it was no longer a "dumb" pipe for social data).
I don't know anyone who was affected by the Tuskeegee syphilis study, but that doesn't mean it was right or we shouldn't be outraged.
Wow? Manipulating emotional response is not part of web design. Somebody failed high school.
So you don't want to create websites that people enjoy using?
That may explain the design of the average Linux user group website, but wold also explains why websites like facebook or even lolcats, that target emotions, have more commercial success.
bickerdyke
Failbook has always proved and will always prove to be intrusive. Yet the sheep that use failbook continue to prove they are nothing more than stuipid little fucks that value nothing at all. Now with this "emotion experiment" the dumb asspie cracker Zuckerberg feels he is beyond any and all laws with his sheep still saying "fuck me in the ass harder Mark." The solution to this simple, shut failbook down. If you must keep in touch that is what email and *gasp* letters via snail fucking mail is for. Then there are also a new fangdangled method called a "website" that will allow for someone to put their shit up. Making a webpage is all too simple. If they can't make one then they are too fucking stupid to even exist let alone use a fucking computer so it is best to let the fucktarded sheeple that use failbook to fucking self destruct and perhaps earn themselves a fucking darwin award along the way.
I dare say I smell the distinct aroma of a Pulitzer from your florid loquaciousness.
Really? You do understand what an experiment is don't you? You do know what informed consent is don't you?
Web design, much like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But more importantly, web design is not about illiciting an emotional response from a user, it's about navigation. How easy it is for people to navigate your site. But if you want to get caught up in putting dancing bears on your web page so people can get a warm and fuzzy feeling, whatever.
The "defense" is painful to read, but boils down to this: stop complaining, or industry may decide to be an even bigger dick. Call me silly, but that doesn't sound like a very good defense.
It's different from A/B testing in that the experiment is explicitly designed to cause harm to half of the participants.
Presumably most A/B testing would be designed to figure out which choice performs better on a set of metrics. But going in, there is little evidence to point to one or the other, and the "harm" caused would simply be in user experience. In this experiment, the researchers had a prior theory about which choice would cause harm, and the harm is emotional and psychological.
All that aside, if this was purely internal research at Facebook, it would still likely be unethical but probably nothing out of the ordinary. The fundamental different is that this is being presented as scientific research. It's published in PNAS. It involve three co-authors from various universities. There are standards, both legal and ethical, that must be followed when engaging in scientific research, and the concern is that such standards were perhaps not followed.
Manipulation and even inducing harm may be widespread throughout the advertising industry, but that's advertising, not science.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
They conducted a psychology experiment without the consent of the test subjects. I'm not sure what the rules are for private organizations, but I do believe that any publicly funded researcher involved in the experiment, or possibly those who use the results, would be at risk of losing all federal funding. I really hope some lawsuits are filed against facebook and any of the researchers because this shouldn't creep in to becoming an accepted norm.
If you are stupid enough to use Facebook... Facebook is not necessary. Life was fun and good before Facebook, and it still is without Facebook.
I quit using Facebook six months ago, but for a couple of years was a regular user.
The "newsfeed" always struck me as enormously manipulated, with Facebook constantly altering the algorithm that determines what you're shown. Even nontechnical users would comment about this, wondering why they didn't see some posts from some people some times.
Some of this may have been benign, trying to figure out what order to display posts relative to relationships, posting frequency, sort of ordinary attempts to sort out "importance".
But I'm sure there was commercial manipulation -- ranking user comments with links to advertising-affiliated sites higher than non-affiliated sites, downranking links to sites likely to lead a person to shorten their Facebook session, etc.
All of this could be considered "manipulation" even though there might not be one single motivation behind it and not all the factors may be even focused on a specific outcome.
Point taken.
I'll reduce that claim to "commercial web design". But that's still the majority of pages out there. They want to SELL. And if it takes those dancing bears, there is no way they won't use dancing bears.
Quick: what toilet paper brand has dancing bears as mascots?
And aren't they cute and funny and loveable.... See, it works.
bickerdyke
It's simple. After an acquisition, Facebook was stuck with a large stockpile of sodium thiopental that they couldn't move because of an EU ban. Hence, it was an ethical obligation to Facebook shareholders to make as many Europeans as depressed as possible to help move inventory. The other option--manipulating the media and restoring lethal injection in the EU--would have been impractical.
And yes, the above is a farce. But in the grand scheme of things, if the above were true it'd pale in comparison to the regular war drum beating that happens in the US regularly to keep the flow of dead bodies and money flowing through the Military-Industrial Complex. As much as a despise PETA's actions of throwing [fake] blood on people over the killing of animals, it seems amazingly appropriate to do such on the many Congressmen who are so quick to support the cycle of industrial dependence on war yet so slow to support the cycle of veteran dependence on the VA.
Let us not even get into the whole point, as others have raised, how the news media is incredibly complicit in manipulating the populace's emotional state, especially when it comes to supporting wars. If it bleeds it leads and what better way to make things bleed than a war? They just need bags of soldier blood for the Senators to bathe in.
There is no fine line here. There's only a bold one. Does it involve humans? If so, not only is tight ethic supervision required (to avoid a Milgram scenario) but, and that's the even more important part, the active and willing consent of the participating people is required.
Anything else, no matter how "trivial" it may be seen, is simply and plainly wrong. And no, some clause somewhere hidden between another few billion lines of legalese in an EULA does NOT constitute consent to being a guinea pig!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
He's using the second half of the definition to state everything anyone does which effects another's emotional state is an experiment; however, the Facebook experiment consisted of effecting the emotions (or, more generally, effecting the being) of others for the sole reason of observing and analyzing said data.
Facebook may have skipped the formal hypothesis step before fucking with people but that's hardly a precluding requirement of an experiment; history has many examples of "for the fuck of it experimentation."
According to this article here [slashdot.org], no messages were changed:
If ANYTHING about the message is altered including delivery schedule, mix of content, etc then they are altering the message. Not everything about a message is the simple content. When you send a message and the tone you use is every bit as important to correct interpretation by the recipient. Facebook altered the messages without actually changing the specific content. If the message was unaltered (including delivery, tone, timing, etc) then we would expect reactions to be identical.
But this line is crossed thousandfold already.
Even if true (which I dispute) it is irrelevant. Just because others do it doesn't make it acceptable for Facebook.
Quick! Someone call the cops to investigate PolygamousRanchKid's ranch! There might be corpses hiding in the walls!
As far as I could tell from reading about this, they didn't change what people said.
Yes they did. There is more to communication than the specific words used. Tone, timing, delivery, emphasis, etc all are part of the message. If Facebook altered any of these to be different from the expectations of the user without informing them beforehand then they changed what people said. There is MUCH more to human communication than the syntax used.
It's still an open question as to whether this sort of thing is appropriate
I disagree. I don't think it is an open question at all. How Facebook did what they did is unacceptable. Doing experiments like this is fine in principle but HOW you do it matters. If you want to do any controlled psychology experiment on people, you need to get an independent ethics review and probably need to get informed consent. This is standard practice for some very good reasons. Nobody is asking Facebook to do anything unreasonable and the fact that they are in any way surprised by the mostly negative response pretty clearly shows that they lack the ethical compass to be trusted.
That's quite silly. The issue is about your peers getting a distorted impression of your mutual peers opinions.
The *direct* victims of the manipulation of social networks will be the masses, not the individuals. But individuals cannot practically opt out of masses or remain outside their spheres of influence, so we'll be indirect victims in time.
The is *nothing* preventing this companies (or the US government through complicit or undercover manipulation) from hiding drugs pro-legalization posts and amplifying pro-war on drugs posts, swaying people's opinions towards a goal set by few people.
I can't honestly understand how someone could find this anything but deeply disturbing and extremely dangerous.
Yet nobody seems to complain about this much–presumably because, when you put it this way, it seems kind of silly to suggest that a company whose business model is predicated on getting its users to use its product more would do anything other than try to manipulate its users into, you know, using its product more.
Back when I was on Facebook, it seemed like every change they made was designed to make me want to use its product less. So much so that I eventually asked them to delete my account.
#DeleteChrome
I read Google News because it gives several different media outlets' spin on the same story. But you need to be aware of which sites are listed and seek out coverage from the other side. They tend to give higher weight to liberal leaning media when the story is a topic liberals are more focused on. For example, the three outlets on today's SCOTUS decision against labor unions are USAToday, LA Times, and NBC, with a Huff Post opinion piece right under that list. One can assume that's just an artifact of Google's ranking based on page views since libs are more likely to read about the story on left leaning outlets, and for conservatives this is kind of a "well duh" decision.
CNN seems to send a subliminal message in their placement of stories; good news stories for Democrats and bad news stories for Republicans tend to be given more prominent coverage. More obviously biased outlets like USAToday, NBC, Huff Post, and Fox don't try to hide it.
Web design, much like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But more importantly, web design is not about illiciting an emotional response from a user, it's about navigation.
So, how do you know whether your web design is beautiful to its beholders/users without experimenting? I've seen enough users rage in forums about shit web sites to know those sites elicit a strong emotional response. I've heard enough people rave about web sites to know those sites elicit a strong emotional response. In fact, almost every minor change in a web site tends to evoke rage from some users and love from others (Hello, slashdot beta, I'm looking at you). Any sane web developer "tests" his design, both the content and the cosmetics and makes modifications based on the rages or raves produced. How is that any different from what FB has done?
I'm sure, for example, that Fox News is continually experimenting with the composition and selection of stories, evaluating what tone elicits the greatest user activity - what do you think: rage posting or squee? FB is getting grief because they disclosed publicly the exact same newsfeed tuning that every other news source does in secret.
When they start seeing if they can manipulate the murder or suicide rates, THEN we can talk about ethics. Until then, hey, anything goes.
So, in this case they tweaked their algorithm for which posts/what priority they show them for some users. This is probably something they do all the time anyways, so this time, they decided to formalize it and add to the research corpus. Seems reasonable to me.
So, what if this had come out differently. What if it had just been Facebook tweaking their algorithms for 'better user experience', would the outcry be as loud? Isn't that what businesses do all the time? Try things, and see what kind of results they get from them?
You have to present all the posts, and you have to choose an order - you can't 'just show them'. Is this always a moral choice? I suppose they could just pick them randomly, but that's not likely to make their users happier either. Where is the line between ordering for control, and ordering to give a better user experience?
why I can't get the song "Happy" out of my head.
I have to agree. The comments on these articles is much ado about nothing. This is news for nerds and the nerd response should be followup questions. What did the research show? What does that mean about humans? Did people from different cultures and backgrounds react differently? etc.
The responses we see here are less nerd-like and more political.
...Facebook could very easily manipulate elections with this sort of thing.
So can any other political campaign, what's your point?
It should be illegal.
Then you need to amend the constitution to make it so. Nobody is being forced to believe the things they read.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The comments on these articles is much ado about nothing.
Nonsense. I quit facebook for the same reason, but this is still substantively different. This was deliberate manipulation of mood solely for the purpose of study. Granted, what Facebook normally does is also horrible, maybe even moreso. After all, if the purpose is either to sell you more shit you don't need, or to manipulate political speech, either way they're being downright evil.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Seriously, come on. Do you PERSONALLY know ANYONE who was affected by this? Neither do I.
Do you PERSONALLY know anyone who was affected by warrantless wire tapping? Neither do I.
Can I just point out that "affected by this" means someone who was shown the CNBC version of SCOTUS's Obamacare ruling instead of FOX's. It means someone who was shown a car crash story instead of a happy puppy. No one's life was significantly altered because of this "intervention." No one has been permanently scarred or harmed in any meaningful way. More people twisted their ankles getting up from breakfast than were turned into raging sociopaths by this experiment.
If warrantless wiretapping, on the other hand, resulted in even one false positive (which I'm not claiming it did...), then it had a greater negative effect on society than FB's experiment.
You haven't been paying attention to the vastly polarized voting population the past few elections, have you? ;)
*eliciting
You both have a point, but you don't need to be so in our faces about it. They have entire teams of people working on making interfaces more friendly.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
So *that's* what the ??? always stands for! It all makes so much sense in retrospect.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
I dare say I smell the distinct aroma of a fucking Pulitzer from your florid fucking loquaciousness.
FTFY
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Is this saying you need a medical licence to troll people? Or that facebook and its like is inherently negative to society?
Seems to me like FB was simply doing some product testing for their customers. FB customers should know as much as they can about the product they are purchasing so they can make an informed decision.
What really disturbs me about this study is the involvement of academics (I have a PhD in Psychology, and work in technology, although I would still consider my self bound by professional ethics).
One might take a view on whether the Facebook study is ethical, from a business perspective, and it's Facebook's lookout as to whether the tradeoff between alienating a few users and the data they obtained is worth it, but as long as this is a purely business A/B type testing situation, it's Facebook's lookout.
When academics become involved (even to some extent if they are actually Facebook employees, but retain professional standing), a whole different set of professional standards come into play. At face value, I think there are lots of doubt about whether this study meets those standards. It seems to activate a whole set of questions which don't apply to "do more people click on this button if it's bluer" cases.
Well, but doesn't this apply to any tuning of any website for more visitors, or better ad response? Moving your google ads from the top to the side, or changing your colors, or taking links out of your content so the only obvious way off the page is an ad, or changing the tone of the blog posts? Websites are constantly doing these types of experiments without saying word one to their users in order to maximize their income from ads. Are you suggesting that every one of them should go through an IRB first? Seems to me that this is inevitable, and if you don't want to be engaged with any particular site, you should go elsewhere. I'm no fan of facebook (in fact, I despise the way it is operated) but my reaction is simply to avoid them, and encourage others to do likewise. I feel no need to control them.
Furthermore, if you wake up one morning, decide you've been a grumpy bastard to others, and resolve to be cheerful to them from now on, are you not undertaking an attempt to modify other's behavior without their consent, by changing the circumstance?
This whole idea of "you can't do X because people might OMG react to it" seems to me to be some kind of psychobbabbly batshittery.
--fyngyrz
(anon due to mod points)
Yes, I have, and I don't care. The voters are all adults and can and do make their own choices. I am not interested in "The devil made me do it." There is either free will, or there isn't. Either way, the 1st Amendment is extremely explicit, all the bad interpretations not withstanding.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Seriously, come on. Do you PERSONALLY know ANYONE who was affected by this? Neither do I.
I don't know any Japanese held in US internment camps during WWII either.
That was still unethical, deserves outrage, should never be repeated, and should be known.
All advertising is about manipulating emotional responses. And advertising has always involved experimentation, they just don't call it that normally.
Which is exactly what broadcasters do. They want to know if they should show the car crash story of the story with the kitten stuck in the tree, and they want to know which will grab the viewer's attention and increase ratings, etc. So they actually do the research, monitoring viewership over time as the channel's style changes, though often this is done by aggregating word of mouth from other stations, following the trade magazines, etc. Facebook was just being more efficient in this regard.
...who was surprised by the results? ...who isn't human? ....would there be two distinct circles, if you put that on a Venn diagram?
This is a big win for transparency. I am glad that Facebook did this and that they are being open about it.
Marketers have known this forever. The media has been manipulating the emotions of the American populace for generations. Through their actions, Facebook is bringing the discussion into the open and making people aware of it. I think that by now, most people are aware of the fact that the "news" is just a propaganda tool used to maintain the narrative of the powers that be.
This is also a big win for personal responsibility. It has now been proven that what we focus on and what we choose to share impacts not only our moods, but the moods of those in our network. The question now becomes, "Will you share positive stories that make people feel good, or negative stories that make them feel bad?" Given control over your own information channel, will you continue to parrot the party line and share mainstream propaganda? Or will you amplify alternate signals?
http://socnetmastermind.blogsp... (ignore the other posts, this is just a place for random, social networking related thoughts)
Would you agree that changing the size of a font or clickable image on your web site is different from changing content intended to create a particular emotional response based on the user logging in?
In other words, it's not the same as web site design, commercial or otherwise. Read the study, it was not just changing cosmetics or ergonomics. It was providing a specific list of content which was manipulated to insight a particular emotional response. We have no idea what these actually were, just that it happened.
Jerry sees in his Newsfeed: 1) top 10 reasons to hate your life. 2) suicide is painless 3) there is no God 4) another financial collapse is eminent 6) Fat people, a detriment to society.
Joe sees in his Newsfeed: 1) top 10 reasons to love life 2) suicide is immoral 4) Community Outreach 5) top 10 places to work 6) 5 easy work outs to lose unwanted pounds
Obviously Joe and Jerry expect the same Newsfeeds if they are signed up for the same stuff. Seeing the above for a few days, or other more nefarious topics, would definitely have impact on a middle aged single guy that is overweight and just divorced.
Again, NO! You don't perform content manipulation to trigger a response in web site design.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
1. With Facebook, you are the product, NOT the customer.
2. Facebook may do anything they wish in order to improve their product.
3. Profit!
Anyone concerned by this needs to read the PNAS paper, and brush up on their statistics. We're looking at a maximum Cohen's d of .02, with a beta on the order of 0.1%. And this is with an astronomical sample size. In other words, using an enormous trove of data, they were just able to detect that an effect probably exists – but that effect is absolutely tiny. Get a grip people.
Per my subject-line: Especially *IF* you use facebook, e.g. -> 0.0.0.0 facebook.com (& any other sites you use to login, & connect to it, ala subdomains involved).
Of course, you *probably* know that, & are just trolling me - however - you *did* ask, & there's your answer.
APK
P.S.=> I don't "do facebook" myself, but I don't think I'd block them out that way if I did (hence, my subject-line) - in this case? I suppose just being aware of it going on is enough & to "steel your mind" against it, & "break the 'mind forg'd manacles'" as I believe William Blake said... apk
I have met such people, who use the "but everyone else is doing it" line.
Nothing short of a slap in the face will stop them. They just do not care about others.
They are not trying to hurt anyone per se; they really think the world is there to serve them and their
whims, people were put here for them to manipulate.
When an adult does such things, it is just sad to watch.
They really have no clue that people are people. There is no difference to them.
In their mind they are not doing anything wrong; the test subjects are not humans to them, just
toys.
You don't seem to actually understand the study. The manipulation was of the News Feed not the content itself. The posts of your friend were analyze to determine whether they were positive or negative. Then, if you had been selected for the negative feed, you would see more negative posts by friends than positive ones. The content of the actual posts was not changed. This seems to be one of the big misunderstandings of the actual study.
This is a violation of ethics pertaining to research. There's no question, no ambiguity, no debate. It is. Very clearly, if you know anything about the ethics pertaining to human research.
This isn't even touching on the fact that, if you bothered to read the actual study, it's essentially "junk science". It lacks many fundamental pieces of proper, peer-reviewed research. Not the least being even a discussion of the ethics of a lack of informed consent or a lack of debriefing.
And now I see why Facebook has been so adamant about forcing users to switch to "news feed" (news selected by them) over the old "most recent" mode. The iPhone app used to have this option but reset it to "news feed" very often without telling the user. Then they just removed the option altogether.
Even now, the website shows an annoying line "showing most recent. back to news feed" when you select most recent for your feeds.
It is beyond clear that "most recent" does not do what they want and silently weaning everyone off it.
It can be argued that any and all social media at one time or another is hijacked from public discourse to a state of social engineering. Thus similar to the education system which "trains people for their station in life" so media indoctrinates people to the paradigms intended for them.
Face book like others has for some time been a social mediator of thought. I think they are simply testing the waters to see how far they can go with it.
Facebook??? I know aunt Ethel uses it, but hasn't it gone the way of 2nd Life yet?