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The alternative is to not know at all that this is possible and accidentally design something that makes people more negative. Knowing this is possible and how
by malandrew 8y ago
The alternative is to not know at all that this is possible and accidentally design something that makes people more negative.
Knowing this is possible and how to measure the effect, lets them detect when they accidentally do it and reverse course.
Making it illegal to figure out the negative impacts of your decisions will make it harder to avoid them.
It would be much better to require disclosure when these negative impacts are detected and require that this information can only ever be used in the best interest of the user.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoPlease find me one real scientist who would argue it's ethical to encourage some people to commit suicide to find out how to avoid encouraging people to commit suicide. Just because the outcome of the research is potentially valuable doesn't mean it's ethical to conduct it on people, especially without their consent.
- hackinthebochs 8y agoMore accurately, expose people in a controlled setting to what they're already being exposed to, to find out its impact. But this sounds pretty neutral.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoI wholly disagree. Facebook only shows some posts algorithmically, and emotionally, they were probably more or less neutral. They chose to expose some people to predominantly sad and depressing posts, which is not "what they're already being exposed to", and it's without the more positive posts to balance it out. They explicitly created a situation to depress people, which could definitely increase the likelihood of suicide, particularly if they happened to randomly select someone who already was predisposed to that for other reasons. I would argue someone at Facebook should've been brought up on criminal charges for this "experiment".
- hackinthebochs 8y ago>Facebook only shows some posts algorithmically, and emotionally, they were probably more or less neutral. I'm assuming you mean in aggregate? > They chose to expose some people to predominantly sad and depressing posts, which is not "what they're already being exposed to" Can you source your "predominantly" here? If their algorithm is operating randomly, it stands to reason that some amount of people will get a "predominantly" negative feed from time to time. So in this sense, some people were unwittingly being exposed to a predominately negative feed. So it seems reasonable to understand the results of this. If their experiment resulted in people seeing negativity far beyond what is a possible outcome from their algorithm, then you might have a point about it being unethical.
- Zak 8y ago> I would argue someone at Facebook should've been brought up on criminal charges for this "experiment". What criminal law did they violate? Or are you saying there should have been a law against what they did?
- flukus 8y agoCriminal Negligence/Manslaughter. You don't have to break a specific law, you just you have to be culpable in something that could foresee-ably have a reasonable chance for someone to be harmed.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoIndeed. And note that these laws are generally state laws in the US, not federal. So just in the US, there's a lot of possible versions of the law/jurisdiction Facebook could face.
- flukus 8y agoI didn't think if that, the jurisdiction would be where the person died, so potentially anywhere in the world with an extradition treaty could charge them.