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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 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?
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?
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!
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).
Facebook uses psychology to make minor changes in our happiness... Something must be done!
Soda companies use psychology to sell huge buckets of sugar water... Hands off our soda, Mayor Bloomberg!
As far as I could tell from reading about this, they didn't change what people said.
Here's the thing, Facebook already filters what you see with the default setup. Your 500 friends each post 10 posts today, and when you load up your page on a social networking site, the page only displays 15. So how are those 15 chosen? (I'm making up numbers here, obviously)
The obvious choice would be to show the 15 most recent posts, but that means there's a good chance you'll miss posts that are important and that you'd like to see, since you're only getting a brief snapshot of what's going on in that social networking site. Facebook instead has an algorithm that tries to determine which of those 5,000 posts you'll care most about. I don't know the specifics, but it includes things like favoring the people who you interact with most on Facebook.
So what Facebook did in this study is they tweaked that algorithm to also favor posts that included negative words. The posts were still from that 5,000 post pool and the contents of the posts were unedited, but they subjected you to a different selection in order to conduct the research.
It's still an open question as to whether this sort of thing is appropriate, but it's important to note that this is something Facebook does all the time anyway. I think where is gets creepy is that Facebook is also an ad-driven company, so you have to wonder what the eventual goal of this research is. I can imagine Facebook favoring posts that include pictures of food to go along with an ad campaign for Seamless. Maybe they'll make a deal with pharmaceutical companies to adjust your feed to make you depressed, while at the same time plastering your feed with ads for antidepressants.