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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.
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.
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
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.