>They admit to exposing people to negative emotional cues at random? I'm not sure the "negative" part matters. Manipulating someone's information in any way is

>They admit to exposing people to negative emotional cues at random? I'm not sure the "negative" part matters. Manipulating someone's information in any way is irresponsible. A message intended to be uplifting can be harmful, say if someone is in a manic state or is unable to relate to the positive message. In politics, I think we all know the dangers of burying bad news. Making people sad is more obviously evil than making people happy, but Facebook has no business trying to do either. >At this point, they are certainly responsible for some number of suicides. I doubt that. The effect size was small (~2% change in frequency of emotional words), and it seems dubious to me that the frequency of positive and negative words actually reflects someone's emotional state. But failure isn't an excuse. Trying to hurt people isn't OK just because you aren't very good at it.