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Ask Slashdot: Is There an Ethical Way Facebook Can Experiment With Their Users?
An anonymous reader writes: This summer, news broke that Facebook had conducted an experiment on some of their users, tweaking which posts showed up in their timeline to see if it affected the tone of their later posts. The fallout was extensive — Facebook took a lot of flack from users and the media for overreaching and violating trust. (Of course, few stopped to think about how Facebook decided what to show people in the first place, but that's beside the point.) Now, Wired is running a somewhat paranoid article saying Facebook can't help but experiment on its users. The writer says this summer's blowback will only show Facebook they need to be sneakier about it.
At the same time, a study came out from Ohio State University saying some users rely on social media to alter their moods. For example, when a user has a bad day, he's likely to look up acquaintances who have it worse off, and feel a bit better that way. Now, going on social media is going to affect your mood in one way or another — shouldn't we try to understand that dynamic? Is there a way Facebook can run experiments like these ethically? (Or Twitter, or Google, or any similarly massive company, of course.)
At the same time, a study came out from Ohio State University saying some users rely on social media to alter their moods. For example, when a user has a bad day, he's likely to look up acquaintances who have it worse off, and feel a bit better that way. Now, going on social media is going to affect your mood in one way or another — shouldn't we try to understand that dynamic? Is there a way Facebook can run experiments like these ethically? (Or Twitter, or Google, or any similarly massive company, of course.)
Ethical and Facebook have nothing in common.
Scientists request it all the time through their internal review board, This isn't really a complex issue, which is why the approach facebook took is considered underhanded and skeevy.
Stop using it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Including this one.
-Zuckerberg.
http://gawker.com/5636765/face...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Yes, it's very simple:
"Dear Facebook user, Facebook is conducting a study to better understand our users. The study will last 2 weeks and no personally identifying information will be recorded. You will likely not notice any difference to Facebook while it's going on. By helping with this study you will help to improve facebook for everyone! Do you consent to be a part of this study?" Y/N
It's called "informed consent"
Actually, if they got VOLUNTEERS, it would be ethical.
Kind of like experimental drug studies, the subjects need to know they are being experimented on, in order that it be ethical.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
To quote The Hound..."Social media is for cunts."
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
For example, when a user has a bad day, he's likely to look up acquaintances who have it worse off, and feel a bit better that way.
That sounds automatable. Schadenfreude, the browser extension.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
They did get volunteers. Everyone who uses FB is a volunteer. They have agreed to FB's terms of service, which allows FB to do this.
Don't like how they run the show? Then don't use FB. If enough other people don't, it will die the death it deserves. But if you keep allowing all your data to be sold for profit, they'll keep doing so. It's not that complex of a concept.
(Of course, few stopped to think about how Facebook decided what to show people in the first place, but that's beside the point.)
No, it's the entire point. Your stream, to the extent that it's "your" stream, is already manipulated in ways you're not told, based on what Facebook thinks you will find interesting, funny, or engaging enough to come back and see more ads. Experiments have to happen as part of Facebook's desire to expand, if only to see which manipulations mean more ads displayed. The only difference is that now the people who are interested in something closer to science than ad sales at Facebook won't tell us about their results. Are you happy?
That's duplicitous. People use Facebook to keep in touch with family and play little web video games. We both know that grandma isn't going to fetch her spectacles to read pages of legalese in tiny grain print.
Your point might technically cover Facebook legally, but Zuckerberg has a history of proving that not all legal acts are ethical. It's the philosophy that his career is founded upon.
The ethical way to do research is to get explicit, informed consent. If you tried at a university to pass off that consent in a TOS buried in a site related to totally different subject matter then you'd probably be expelled.
The whole point here is that you need somebody else who is not the experimenter to sign off on the experiment when humans are involved. We call those people the IRB.
What's that, tech industry? You think a/b testing would be impacted? That's a popularity contest, not an experiment. Facebook's experimet had the specific goal of being able to manipulate the emotions of their users, which goes far beyond simply asking which website layout they find more attractive or useful.
What's that, tech industry? You think it would take way too much time if you had to get approval for experiments? Then throw together a multi-company group to found your own IRB. I'm sure there are universites that would be willing to partner with that group to lend their advice and help the group get started quickly.
What's that, tech industry? You think that there is not way you could conduct your experiments if you had to get proper informed consent, (which has specific criteria - an EULA or TOS does not count)? First: welcome to the club. Sometimes, doing proper and ethical experiments is hard. Many disciplines have tog deal with that, and I guarantee it is easier to find alternative ways to test your theories about "social media" than it is for the psychologist trying to investigate complex mental health issues, and both of those areas of research get to skip the whole "untested, unknown, and probably horribly dangerous new drug" mess that some doctoroso have to find a way to test without killing the participants.
Worse - and this betrays the total and complete ignorance of the people at Facebook that ran this experiment - if they had bothered to ask an IRB like you are supposed to, there is a good chance they could have gotten some requirements such as having to get informed consent in advance could have been waived. Their experiment simply wasn't that risky, compared to most experiments involving human testing.
TL;DR - If the tech industry decided to work with the process and bothered to ask an IRB, they would have avoided a lot of bad PR. Their failure to do this - and their insistence afterwords that even a trivial "trust but verifyf" is the kind of thing that only applies to *other people* only serves to make people fear the entire insutry. Justifiably. Would you want to buy stuff from people that avoid every ethics regulation?
Of course, I haven't addressed any of the state laws, some of which have even stronger requirements...
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
"Sign up for other services and you volunteer to participate in random experiments" is NOT ethical.
For it to be ethical it would have to be a very clear opt-in procedure, not something buried in a ToS somewhere.
But Facebook is just doing the same things other consumer product/service providers do to their customers. It was only newsworthy because it was Facebook.
TOS-speak is not accepted by anyone in any of the various corners of science that perform human subjects research.
Nope! When subjects volunteer for a specific study or survey, sure. But most consumer research doesn't require informed consent unless there is direct interaction between the researcher and the subjects. A/B advertising research, OKcupid's experiments ... informed consent is buried in the boilerplate or completely absent. That's even partially true for some medical research: you aren't required to give informed consent for each research project that uses a sample taken from you if you gave a blanket consent when it was taken.