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Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be the final straw (2012)

161 points by seesawtron 6y ago

stadium 6y ago
The ultimate propaganda machine.
chris_wot 6y ago
That was when I started to realise just how bad they were.
yeuxardents 6y ago
This was the last straw for me, thats when I permabanned facebook from my life. This was an unauthorized, unguided, unethical, mass psychological experiment on human beings. Anyone involved should have gone to jail for crimes against humanity.
- jbverschoor 6y ago
  luckily we don't have the dependency on fb anynmore, since nobody forces "login with facebook" anymore thesem days
- neonological 6y ago
  No it's not a crime against humanity, let's not go that far and let's not unreasonably promote cancel culture by burning the witch at the stake before giving the issue some deep thought. It's a much more complicated issue then you describe. Many corporate organizations have been selectively distributing information to deliberately influence sentiment for decades. Facebook is not the first nor will they be the last. Restricting any entity from doing this is a complicated issue that has to do with restricting freedom of speech. Fox news comes to mind when I think of another organization that does this deliberately. To add more complication to the issue one should consider the fact that the success of Fox news can also be attributed to it's customers: people. People choose what they want to hear, and many people prefer news viewed through a biased right leaning lens. Just like how the above poster wants to paint this issue as a crime against humanity, I think part of the problem is that on some level we all want to lie to ourselves. We want to view the world in a very specific and certain black and white way.
  - xg15 6y ago
    Ok, so clandestine manipulation is freedom of speech. Is that what the founding fathers intended?
    - neonological 6y ago
      No but when you restrict clandestine manipulation you restrict freedom of speech. Giving the government such power gives them the oversight to use the "clandestine manipulation" excuse on other things as well. Like I said, not so clear cut. It's a complex world we live in. But I get why someone would vote me down. It's easier to see everything in terms of black and white. The truth, however, is grey. Take freedom of religion for example. Freedom of religion allows cults like Scientology to form. If we allow the government to have the power to eliminate Scientology what kind of power does it give the government over Christianity or Buddhism? Personally my view is that the cost is worth the benefit, because the alternative is much worse.
      - xg15 6y ago
        > Giving the government such power gives them the oversight to use the "clandestine manipulation" excuse on other things as well. Like for example? > Personally my view is that the cost is worth the benefit, because the alternative is much worse. A comfortable view if the cost is mainly paid by others.
        neonological 6y ago
        Like for example you’re clandestinely manipulating me right now. Everything you say is manipulation of me towards your opinion. And you say it’s a cost paid by others? Can you give me an example of how I don’t pay the cost? Right you can’t because you didn’t know that I’m a user of Facebook. Logically it is impossible for you to know whether I “pay” for these costs or not. Basically without knowing who I am you made up a lie out of thin air. There is no other logic that can explain what you just said as you know nothing about me. Is lying in itself not clandestine manipulation? Are you not lying in attempt to clandestinely manipulate me and others reading this towards your opinion? You obviously have no skin in the game, you don’t even use Facebook, you’re just harping off about it because you don’t give a shit about freedom of speech at all. Is the paragraph above true or a manipulative lie? Did lying like that make you angry? What about that garbage lie you made up about me? Is this the same brainless response and fury everyone is reacting to Facebook “experimenting” on us without deeper consideration? Does me or you being angry about manipulative bullshit give either of us the right to clamp down on our right to say it? Should I have the right to call the police on you for making up shit and lying? No. And honestly outside of the context of “giving you an example” I suggest you check yourself. The drivel coming out of your mouth is deliberately offensive. “A cost paid by others” is an outright lie made up for the express purpose of manipulation and inciting anger. Emotional manipulation is no less evil then experimental manipulation. Careful what you do to your own freedom of speech rights... If you succeed, one day your ideas will be muzzling your own manipulative vitriol like a dog. Perhaps I can call out to dang, have him come over and moderate this thread. No let’s make it so that the government can moderate Facebook, which then in turn means they can moderate you. What do you think is the justification the CCP gives themselves when they moderate the entire internet in China? It’s the same justification you’ve given me, they seek to moderate clandestine manipulation.
- mgraczyk 6y ago
  The outcome of this experiment is that for a few days, around 150k people posted ~0.3% more negative words on Facebook. Is that something engineers and data scientists should be imprisoned over? I think most US politicians cause bigger effects every time they tweet.
  - yeuxardents 6y ago
    Yes, is it known whether anyone affected committed suicide? Was that a part of the test, did they take that in to effect, did they ensure there were signals that if that could happen they would lay off the negativity for those people? Any psychology course at a University on ethics shows this is mass experimentation without proper oversight. I for one, do not believe that a bunch of twats in silicon valley give a crap about ethics, do you?
- Google234 6y ago
  Would you be happier if FB censored every negative post on their site? I’m sure there would be less unhappiness but would it be “better”?
  - yeuxardents 6y ago
    Thats now what this is about.
- hackinthebochs 6y ago
  People keep using the words "psychological experiment" as if it proves the point. No, its just a more emotional description of what happened. Why, exactly, is controlled manipulation to gather scientific data require extra consent than doing random manipulation they already have consent for?
  - yeuxardents 6y ago
    Because this is clearly altering emotional states. Is it known whether any individuals became more sad than others and committed suicide as a cause? No? Well thats because studies like this are required to go through IRB and review processes to ensure outcomes like that DO NOT HAPPEN. That did not happen here.
chatmasta 6y ago
Pre-2013 was a wild time on the internet. It seems like that’s when a lot of its nasty underbelly went mainstream. The Snowden leaks were a turning point, I think, when people realized “the NSA and corporations are spying on you” wasn’t just a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. It’s mind blowing to think that most major sites on the internet (including Amazon) were not using HTTPS at that time. It’s possible Amazon used it on its payment pages, but it certainly didn’t for much of the site. Tools like FireSheep existed for years before anyone started to care that everyone from your coffeeshop to your ISP could read your plaintext traffic. Now 9 years later we’re finally about to fix DNS (albeit with protocols hostile to reverse engineering). Then hopefully up next is fixing BGP before the bad guys realize how absurdly vulnerable it is. All this is to say, Facebook could maybe be excused for this experiment, because our standards for “that’s messed up” were already so much lower in 2012 than they are now.
- cryptoz 6y ago
  There is no excuse for this. This was a morally bankrupt and exceedingly awful thing to do. I was absolutely furious when this happened and made it a life mission to help other people know this was going on. 99% of people don't know this event happened, still. I don't trust Facebook one bit. I assume they do this kind of illegal 'experiment' all the time now, and the only change is they stopped bragging about it. So gross, this whole thing, it makes me mad there were no real repercussions from this. Worse yet is how many people actually support this unethical and sick experiment from Facebook. Lots of people don't see anything wrong with it, even technical people like those on HN, and that is just as disturbing to me as Facebook actually carrying it out. --- Edit: I'm now blocked from posting on HN (for a while I guess?), so here is my response to a poster below. @antiterra says, > That you’d prefer they either stayed ignorant or unconcerned to what changes they made and their effect is exceedingly awful and morally bankrupt. I have no idea how you reached the conclusion that I would prefer either of those things. There is a massive chasm between 'perform illegal, unethical mass psychological experiments' and 'I don't care about stuff'. --- @chatmasta says I'm not blocked, but I am. I cannot reply to you either. It says I'm posting too fast and won't let me submit any content.
  - 6y ago
vmception 6y ago
Do we know what specific week that was? Would like to see it affected trading patterns or the VIX.
- rationalfaith 6y ago
  Really good point there. Curious about that too. This is could a be huge vector for market manipulation.
antiterra 6y ago
Product Person #1: Hey, here’s a writeup that says if we show too many positive posts to people that it creates bad feelings. Should we show less positive posts? Product Person #2: Not sure, wouldn’t negative posts make people feel worse? Product Person #1: Wow, I donno, maybe we should try adjusting additional posts people see one way a bit and see what happens? Product Person #2: Not a bad idea, how about we try both? You know, an A/B test. Product Person #1: Hmmm. Ok, but— when we’re done, let’s have some scientific review of our data just so that we can correct the record and push along the science around this stuff. Journalist: This company deliberately made people sad
- chatmasta 6y ago
  I admit I didn’t read the article because I thought I knew the event it was referring to, but didn’t Facebook actually publish this as a psychology study? i.e. they didn’t just use it for A/B testing features but actually thought they were doing something “good” to the point of publishing a study about it. It’s laughable now lol.
  - cryptoz 6y ago
    Yes, they published the paper and publicly bragged about how successful they were in making hundreds of thousands of people feel sad. https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf Edit: And it is in their public defense of this paper that they think we all gave 'informed consent' to this kind of psychological manipulation when we signed up for Facebook because it's in the TOS. They literally define 'informed consent' as the legal text in their TOS. I mean that's insane, they know their users don't read that before signing up. It's not f'ing informed or consent ugh this makes me so mad. Also what kind of sick company puts into their TOS that they can emotionally manipulate you on purpose whenever they want? Fucked up.
    - wpietri 6y ago
      Agreed. If people end up surprised about what they nominally consented to, it's not informed consent. Another example of Facebook's "move fast and break people" ethos.
bserge 6y ago
Yes, indeed, we should all learn not to use our emotions in online discussions. People will say and do things that they would never say in real life, even under their real name, because of the disconnection from the actual person hearing/reading/seeing that. Funnily enough, this is how I quit Imgur for good. It's amazing. I posted something that I believed was right and got downvoted to hell. So I started asking people "why, why do you downvote?" and got mostly laughs, memes and people calling me stupid. Except one person, who said "you care way too much about this". Indeed, I did. Thank you random person! Not sure why but it affected me more on Imgur. Maybe it's the length of the comments? The memes that encompass a thousand words, as they say? Regardless, I just deleted my account and never went back. It's great. Still trying to quit Reddit and HN, but they're good resources if you ignore all the stupidity. Imgur is bottom of the barrel social media, but it was fun. And of course, this is used by various media outlets, has been for a long time. It's all about eliciting emotions, which come from the primitive part of the brain, bypassing any advanced conscious analysis and engaging the impulse to do either what you're told (good for sales) or the opposite of it (good for spreading a message) or something in between, but it's a response that you will remember and most likely take action. I forgot what I was trying to say. Somehow Facebook never got me, it's just a useless platform aside from contacting people.
- towergratis 6y ago
  It does affect you. Because you get the feeling you are "part" of the community. I used to be very active in HN until I got into a heated discussion with someone and since then my HN "flag" privileges were stripped away. I know I shouldn't care, but I couldn't help it. Now I am just lurking on HN and rarely reply with this new account using TOR and care as little about "karma" as I do about "producing value" with my replies to HN.
  - doublerabbit 6y ago
    Feel the same. HN is exactly the same as Reddit, just a different crowd and less edge. It's nice to think that you can have a civil discussion on the HN platform but you can't. The whole internet karma/points is a flawed system. For HN: You should have to give a reason to down votes. To give someone downvote permissions and then allow them to downvote on something they bias, isn't far.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cryptoz 6y ago
Article published 2014 not 2012 I think, btw. Event happened in 2012.
hackinthebochs 6y ago
I still don't see why I should be outraged over this. A user of facebook already consents to facebook displaying whatever content on their feed facebook chooses. Why should facebook require extra consent to gather scientific evidence on the effects of the content being displayed, given they are only analyzing data they already gather?
- xg15 6y ago
  Because "consent" is worthless if it is not informed consent. And it's neither expected by, nor in the interest of the user to be emotionally manipulated. By the way, the whole "intelligent" newsfeed is likely not expected either. My guess is, most people sign up to Facebook with the expectation to see the update of all their friends, nit be subject to Facebook's AI games and product research.
  - hackinthebochs 6y ago
    But "emotional manipulation" may already be happening by using the website. If the user gave consent to that, I don't see what difference the act of gathering scientific data makes. Your argument seems to be against the current bar of consent that facebook and similar sites are required to get.
    - xg15 6y ago
      The user never consented to "emotional manipulation". If anything, the user consented to usage of an algorithmic newsfeed that ranks posts based on unknown criteria, but always with "relevance" as the overall goal. There is nothing about emotional manipulation in this. Emotional manipulation is also clearly not in the user's self interest, so there is no reason why they ever should give consent. (As opposed to an AI newsfeed, which could be a useful feature if it worked in the user's interest)
      - hackinthebochs 6y ago
        Emotional manipulation was scare quoted for a reason. Consent to "rank posts based on unknown criteria to maximize relevance" will incidentally, at least on some occasions, cause "emotional manipulation" in the consumers of the feed. So again, consent is already provided for the possibility of emotional manipulation. What's the difference between accidental and scientifically valid emotional manipulation such that extra consent is needed?
jancsika 6y ago
Is it against the rules for me to use HN as a dating site? I'm going to pen-test it: I enjoy cuddling, long walks on the beach, and services that do not run social experiments on me like something out of a cheap movie plot about a mad-scientist. to contact this user please dial "jancsika" on your rotary phone now
- neonological 6y ago
  This is a psychological experiment on me and all the users on this site and I am now outraged.
- alfl 6y ago
  You asked our permission so unfortunately this experiment is not comparable with Facebook’s.
  - jancsika 6y ago
    Fortunately and wittingly it is not comparable!
sidcool 6y ago
Facebook has indeed done much harm to individuals and the society as a whole. But at the same time, their tenacity to continue making money is impressive. Villiams too have some quaint evil power.
jimbob45 6y ago
I don’t know anyone that uses Facebook anymore that likes it. Everyone I know who uses it says, “I’m thinking I should delete it soon”. Universally, the number one criticism is, “All I ever wanted to see are my friends’ posts and every update shows me less and less of those”. Does anyone actually know people who avidly use and love Facebook? It seems like Facebook is like the Christian church where the church and everyone says they go every Sunday but it’s really more like once a year at this point.
- alistairSH 6y ago
  Same boat here. Wife deleted her account. I keep mine only to use the market (currently, the best place to sell bicycle parts locally). I'll probably delete my account once I do my next round of parts bin purging.
throw7 6y ago
"Anyone using facebook is a dumb fuck." - Mark Zuckerberg
jb775 6y ago
I noticed during the election that whenever I glanced at the fb "watch" video section, it was videos of guys getting into fist fights, or videos containing disturbing violence. I don't ever watch or search for videos like this, so it's not like it was selected based on my watch history or something. At the time, I figured it was a psychological trick to suck me into viewing more ads since violence has that "can't look away" nature to it...but now that I think about it, they could have been intentionally stirring up angry emotions within the general population during the election cycle. Anyone else notice this?
- bob33212 6y ago
  I rarely use facbook but when I do they show me some woodworking projects. I have never said anything about woodworking or joined any wordworking groups on facebook. They are just making a guess that someone like me would find those interesting.
  - beforeolives 6y ago
    You're breaking some data scientist's heart by calling their model "just making a guess".
- tittenfick 6y ago
  Social media algorithms are designed to show you things which make you upset because that type of content is highly likely to "engage."
  - dbtc 6y ago
    aren’t they designed to optimize for most engagement, in whichever way they can (which turns out to be with upsetting content)? Or are people actually selecting specifically upsetting stuff?
    - tittenfick 6y ago
      Yes, they are designed to select for most engagement, regardless of the content.
ACow_Adonis 6y ago
I admit confusion. isn't unsolicited experimental psychological manipulation without consent just another word for most modern marketing? I mean don't get me wrong, I dont like it and try to exclude it from my life and my families life, but there's pretty wide acceptance socially for this type of behaviour. I would of thought the beauty industry would be an old perpetrator that should generally be investigated. going to shut down that? and negatively instilling fear and distrust in a population without their consent for personal gain is about as old as politics itself? isn't this practically mainstream media behaviour? fomo? status anxiety? conspicuous consumption? I don't see why Facebook should be singled out for society-wide mandated and culturally supported practices.
luckylion 6y ago
"News media deliberately make people outraged. This ought to be the final straw". I don't have issues with the study in general. You do want to know whether and how you can influence people in a positive or negative way, especially if you want to avoid it. There's really no other way to find out than to study it. They should've gotten clear consent for participation in that study, but that's about it from my point of view.
- seoaeu 6y ago
  "There was nothing wrong except for the lack of consent" is really rather missing the point... In other contexts that's the difference between acceptable behavior and a felony.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    I don't understand the article (and most of the comments) to be about the lack of consent, but about the act itself: deliberately making people sad. In most medical studies, that's not being done. You might give someone placebos and watch what happens when you don't give them the medication you want to test, but you're not giving people cancer to see what helps best. I'm not sure consent would've made a fundamental difference to that reaction to it.
alfl 6y ago
When they announced that they had this capability a couple of years ago I deleted my account.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
aasasd 6y ago
In related news, to keep their job or occupy their time, journalists and social media commenters continue pretending that web users have self-respect.
fogof 6y ago
How sad did this experiment really make people? The chart in the study says that people who saw fewer positive posts used one percent fewer positive words and about 0.3% more negative words. But on the other hand, they were seeing fewer positive posts, so maybe they were just replying to the posts they saw in a way that was natural, without their inner emotional state being very affected.
- seattle_spring 6y ago
  Excuse me, but this is the HN bi-hourly "Facebook is evil" post (tm). Questioning the content is against the rules.
  - pindab0ter 6y ago
    There’s no need for this.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - bryan_w 6y ago
      I mean it is a bit odd that this is from 2012 and was reposted today. It's almost like it was posted because there hadn't been a negative story in while
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  Does it matter?
dhosek 6y ago
9 years later and still a whole lot of straw left.
d3ntb3ev1l 6y ago
In other news, the ocean is wet
imwillofficial 6y ago
What if somebody had killed themselves? This type of unconsensual experimentation is criminal.
wruza 6y ago
Honestly that sounds like “this stuff dealer is bad because they make people sad while they wait for a dose; I quit, clean for 2d 6h 19min”. No doubt facebook is evil, corporate monster, etc, but hey what about stopping being a junkie. The problem is not someone experimenting with your unhealthy addiction, it is your unhealthy addiction. At the early stages of the internet, most of the content was hidden, waiting for you to actively discover and bookmark it. Like you do with good places in your town - you find one, add it to your address book and visit occasionally. It was a slow process, full of findings, enjoyment and variety. Now everyone seems to sit at their mailbox, desperately waiting for another pack of junk mail to arrive. Facebook is just that - a postman who chooses from a variety of crap to push into your inbox. It doesn’t change lives unless people are too lazy to live by themselves.
- xg15 6y ago
  > The problem is not someone experimenting with your unhealthy addiction, it is your unhealthy addiction. Why is it my unhealthy addiction if a multi-billion dollar company uses all tools at their disposal to push me into said addiction?
  - wruza 6y ago
    I mean, it’s not their addiction and not their problem. Everyone tries to push/trick/force you into it, from drug cartels to facebook. You can’t do much with neither of them for a variety of reasons, thus it sounds reasonable to perceive it as something that you should refrain from by yourself. And you can do that even without Quitting Facebook, just bookmark an url that has no feed in it. Personally I’m not using facebook, but e.g. youtube always tries to push me into viewing something. But I simply do not scroll the feed, and go to subs or search instead when I want something new. Only user’s laziness allows them to take control, and only a user is in control of their laziness. All of those who complain about the modern internet forget that old internet required you to “surf” it very actively. FAANG exists as a multi-trillion industry only because people are inert content junkies with a thumb.
    - xg15 6y ago
postpurchase 6y ago
I've given up social media, it's been fantastic.
xg15 6y ago
> But the issue of consent also doesn't quite explain why we're comfortable with some types of uninformed research on us, but not others. Like almost every major tech firm, Facebook practices A/B testing Are "we" actually comfortable with that practice? (And who is "we" in the first place? The general public? Tech people? Journalists?) It seems to me, this is simply something the industry does because it can get away with it - and most users don't object because they don't even know it's happening. Why tech journalists see the Facebook thing as objectionable but A/B tests without consent as perfectly fine might be a question worth discussing.
niyikiza 6y ago
Perhaps some A/B testing at The Guardian showed that headlines condemning tech giants are more clickable.
mgraczyk 6y ago
As a former FB employee who worked on ranking, I just want to point out how absolutely tiny the effect size is here when we think about normal human emotional experience. On a per person basis, this experiment had an effect that is comparable to other potential changes like slightly altering the padding on the "like" button, or showing 1 extra news post per day, or sending an extra notification once per month. Facebook didn't make people sad. It made a population post things with slightly more negative words, only significant when measured across hundreds of thousands of users.

161 points by seesawtron 6y ago

stadium 6y ago

The ultimate propaganda machine.

chris_wot 6y ago

That was when I started to realise just how bad they were.

yeuxardents 6y ago

This was the last straw for me, thats when I permabanned facebook from my life. This was an unauthorized, unguided, unethical, mass psychological experiment on human beings. Anyone involved should have gone to jail for crimes against humanity.

jbverschoor 6y ago
luckily we don't have the dependency on fb anynmore, since nobody forces "login with facebook" anymore thesem days
neonological 6y ago
No it's not a crime against humanity, let's not go that far and let's not unreasonably promote cancel culture by burning the witch at the stake before giving the issue some deep thought. It's a much more complicated issue then you describe. Many corporate organizations have been selectively distributing information to deliberately influence sentiment for decades. Facebook is not the first nor will they be the last. Restricting any entity from doing this is a complicated issue that has to do with restricting freedom of speech. Fox news comes to mind when I think of another organization that does this deliberately. To add more complication to the issue one should consider the fact that the success of Fox news can also be attributed to it's customers: people. People choose what they want to hear, and many people prefer news viewed through a biased right leaning lens. Just like how the above poster wants to paint this issue as a crime against humanity, I think part of the problem is that on some level we all want to lie to ourselves. We want to view the world in a very specific and certain black and white way.
- xg15 6y ago
  Ok, so clandestine manipulation is freedom of speech. Is that what the founding fathers intended?
  - neonological 6y ago
    No but when you restrict clandestine manipulation you restrict freedom of speech. Giving the government such power gives them the oversight to use the "clandestine manipulation" excuse on other things as well. Like I said, not so clear cut. It's a complex world we live in. But I get why someone would vote me down. It's easier to see everything in terms of black and white. The truth, however, is grey. Take freedom of religion for example. Freedom of religion allows cults like Scientology to form. If we allow the government to have the power to eliminate Scientology what kind of power does it give the government over Christianity or Buddhism? Personally my view is that the cost is worth the benefit, because the alternative is much worse.
    - xg15 6y ago
      > Giving the government such power gives them the oversight to use the "clandestine manipulation" excuse on other things as well. Like for example? > Personally my view is that the cost is worth the benefit, because the alternative is much worse. A comfortable view if the cost is mainly paid by others.
      - neonological 6y ago
        Like for example you’re clandestinely manipulating me right now. Everything you say is manipulation of me towards your opinion. And you say it’s a cost paid by others? Can you give me an example of how I don’t pay the cost? Right you can’t because you didn’t know that I’m a user of Facebook. Logically it is impossible for you to know whether I “pay” for these costs or not. Basically without knowing who I am you made up a lie out of thin air. There is no other logic that can explain what you just said as you know nothing about me. Is lying in itself not clandestine manipulation? Are you not lying in attempt to clandestinely manipulate me and others reading this towards your opinion? You obviously have no skin in the game, you don’t even use Facebook, you’re just harping off about it because you don’t give a shit about freedom of speech at all. Is the paragraph above true or a manipulative lie? Did lying like that make you angry? What about that garbage lie you made up about me? Is this the same brainless response and fury everyone is reacting to Facebook “experimenting” on us without deeper consideration? Does me or you being angry about manipulative bullshit give either of us the right to clamp down on our right to say it? Should I have the right to call the police on you for making up shit and lying? No. And honestly outside of the context of “giving you an example” I suggest you check yourself. The drivel coming out of your mouth is deliberately offensive. “A cost paid by others” is an outright lie made up for the express purpose of manipulation and inciting anger. Emotional manipulation is no less evil then experimental manipulation. Careful what you do to your own freedom of speech rights... If you succeed, one day your ideas will be muzzling your own manipulative vitriol like a dog. Perhaps I can call out to dang, have him come over and moderate this thread. No let’s make it so that the government can moderate Facebook, which then in turn means they can moderate you. What do you think is the justification the CCP gives themselves when they moderate the entire internet in China? It’s the same justification you’ve given me, they seek to moderate clandestine manipulation.
mgraczyk 6y ago
The outcome of this experiment is that for a few days, around 150k people posted ~0.3% more negative words on Facebook. Is that something engineers and data scientists should be imprisoned over? I think most US politicians cause bigger effects every time they tweet.
- yeuxardents 6y ago
  Yes, is it known whether anyone affected committed suicide? Was that a part of the test, did they take that in to effect, did they ensure there were signals that if that could happen they would lay off the negativity for those people? Any psychology course at a University on ethics shows this is mass experimentation without proper oversight. I for one, do not believe that a bunch of twats in silicon valley give a crap about ethics, do you?
Google234 6y ago
Would you be happier if FB censored every negative post on their site? I’m sure there would be less unhappiness but would it be “better”?
- yeuxardents 6y ago
  Thats now what this is about.
hackinthebochs 6y ago
People keep using the words "psychological experiment" as if it proves the point. No, its just a more emotional description of what happened. Why, exactly, is controlled manipulation to gather scientific data require extra consent than doing random manipulation they already have consent for?
- yeuxardents 6y ago
  Because this is clearly altering emotional states. Is it known whether any individuals became more sad than others and committed suicide as a cause? No? Well thats because studies like this are required to go through IRB and review processes to ensure outcomes like that DO NOT HAPPEN. That did not happen here.

chatmasta 6y ago

Pre-2013 was a wild time on the internet. It seems like that’s when a lot of its nasty underbelly went mainstream. The Snowden leaks were a turning point, I think, when people realized “the NSA and corporations are spying on you” wasn’t just a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. It’s mind blowing to think that most major sites on the internet (including Amazon) were not using HTTPS at that time. It’s possible Amazon used it on its payment pages, but it certainly didn’t for much of the site. Tools like FireSheep existed for years before anyone started to care that everyone from your coffeeshop to your ISP could read your plaintext traffic. Now 9 years later we’re finally about to fix DNS (albeit with protocols hostile to reverse engineering). Then hopefully up next is fixing BGP before the bad guys realize how absurdly vulnerable it is. All this is to say, Facebook could maybe be excused for this experiment, because our standards for “that’s messed up” were already so much lower in 2012 than they are now.

cryptoz 6y ago
There is no excuse for this. This was a morally bankrupt and exceedingly awful thing to do. I was absolutely furious when this happened and made it a life mission to help other people know this was going on. 99% of people don't know this event happened, still. I don't trust Facebook one bit. I assume they do this kind of illegal 'experiment' all the time now, and the only change is they stopped bragging about it. So gross, this whole thing, it makes me mad there were no real repercussions from this. Worse yet is how many people actually support this unethical and sick experiment from Facebook. Lots of people don't see anything wrong with it, even technical people like those on HN, and that is just as disturbing to me as Facebook actually carrying it out. --- Edit: I'm now blocked from posting on HN (for a while I guess?), so here is my response to a poster below. @antiterra says, > That you’d prefer they either stayed ignorant or unconcerned to what changes they made and their effect is exceedingly awful and morally bankrupt. I have no idea how you reached the conclusion that I would prefer either of those things. There is a massive chasm between 'perform illegal, unethical mass psychological experiments' and 'I don't care about stuff'. --- @chatmasta says I'm not blocked, but I am. I cannot reply to you either. It says I'm posting too fast and won't let me submit any content.
- 6y ago

vmception 6y ago

Do we know what specific week that was? Would like to see it affected trading patterns or the VIX.

rationalfaith 6y ago
Really good point there. Curious about that too. This is could a be huge vector for market manipulation.

antiterra 6y ago

Product Person #1: Hey, here’s a writeup that says if we show too many positive posts to people that it creates bad feelings. Should we show less positive posts? Product Person #2: Not sure, wouldn’t negative posts make people feel worse? Product Person #1: Wow, I donno, maybe we should try adjusting additional posts people see one way a bit and see what happens? Product Person #2: Not a bad idea, how about we try both? You know, an A/B test. Product Person #1: Hmmm. Ok, but— when we’re done, let’s have some scientific review of our data just so that we can correct the record and push along the science around this stuff. Journalist: This company deliberately made people sad

chatmasta 6y ago
I admit I didn’t read the article because I thought I knew the event it was referring to, but didn’t Facebook actually publish this as a psychology study? i.e. they didn’t just use it for A/B testing features but actually thought they were doing something “good” to the point of publishing a study about it. It’s laughable now lol.
- cryptoz 6y ago
  Yes, they published the paper and publicly bragged about how successful they were in making hundreds of thousands of people feel sad. https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf Edit: And it is in their public defense of this paper that they think we all gave 'informed consent' to this kind of psychological manipulation when we signed up for Facebook because it's in the TOS. They literally define 'informed consent' as the legal text in their TOS. I mean that's insane, they know their users don't read that before signing up. It's not f'ing informed or consent ugh this makes me so mad. Also what kind of sick company puts into their TOS that they can emotionally manipulate you on purpose whenever they want? Fucked up.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    Agreed. If people end up surprised about what they nominally consented to, it's not informed consent. Another example of Facebook's "move fast and break people" ethos.

bserge 6y ago

Yes, indeed, we should all learn not to use our emotions in online discussions. People will say and do things that they would never say in real life, even under their real name, because of the disconnection from the actual person hearing/reading/seeing that. Funnily enough, this is how I quit Imgur for good. It's amazing. I posted something that I believed was right and got downvoted to hell. So I started asking people "why, why do you downvote?" and got mostly laughs, memes and people calling me stupid. Except one person, who said "you care way too much about this". Indeed, I did. Thank you random person! Not sure why but it affected me more on Imgur. Maybe it's the length of the comments? The memes that encompass a thousand words, as they say? Regardless, I just deleted my account and never went back. It's great. Still trying to quit Reddit and HN, but they're good resources if you ignore all the stupidity. Imgur is bottom of the barrel social media, but it was fun. And of course, this is used by various media outlets, has been for a long time. It's all about eliciting emotions, which come from the primitive part of the brain, bypassing any advanced conscious analysis and engaging the impulse to do either what you're told (good for sales) or the opposite of it (good for spreading a message) or something in between, but it's a response that you will remember and most likely take action. I forgot what I was trying to say. Somehow Facebook never got me, it's just a useless platform aside from contacting people.

towergratis 6y ago
It does affect you. Because you get the feeling you are "part" of the community. I used to be very active in HN until I got into a heated discussion with someone and since then my HN "flag" privileges were stripped away. I know I shouldn't care, but I couldn't help it. Now I am just lurking on HN and rarely reply with this new account using TOR and care as little about "karma" as I do about "producing value" with my replies to HN.
- doublerabbit 6y ago
  Feel the same. HN is exactly the same as Reddit, just a different crowd and less edge. It's nice to think that you can have a civil discussion on the HN platform but you can't. The whole internet karma/points is a flawed system. For HN: You should have to give a reason to down votes. To give someone downvote permissions and then allow them to downvote on something they bias, isn't far.

deleted 6y ago

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cryptoz 6y ago

Article published 2014 not 2012 I think, btw. Event happened in 2012.

hackinthebochs 6y ago

I still don't see why I should be outraged over this. A user of facebook already consents to facebook displaying whatever content on their feed facebook chooses. Why should facebook require extra consent to gather scientific evidence on the effects of the content being displayed, given they are only analyzing data they already gather?

xg15 6y ago
Because "consent" is worthless if it is not informed consent. And it's neither expected by, nor in the interest of the user to be emotionally manipulated. By the way, the whole "intelligent" newsfeed is likely not expected either. My guess is, most people sign up to Facebook with the expectation to see the update of all their friends, nit be subject to Facebook's AI games and product research.
- hackinthebochs 6y ago
  But "emotional manipulation" may already be happening by using the website. If the user gave consent to that, I don't see what difference the act of gathering scientific data makes. Your argument seems to be against the current bar of consent that facebook and similar sites are required to get.
  - xg15 6y ago
    The user never consented to "emotional manipulation". If anything, the user consented to usage of an algorithmic newsfeed that ranks posts based on unknown criteria, but always with "relevance" as the overall goal. There is nothing about emotional manipulation in this. Emotional manipulation is also clearly not in the user's self interest, so there is no reason why they ever should give consent. (As opposed to an AI newsfeed, which could be a useful feature if it worked in the user's interest)
    - hackinthebochs 6y ago
      Emotional manipulation was scare quoted for a reason. Consent to "rank posts based on unknown criteria to maximize relevance" will incidentally, at least on some occasions, cause "emotional manipulation" in the consumers of the feed. So again, consent is already provided for the possibility of emotional manipulation. What's the difference between accidental and scientifically valid emotional manipulation such that extra consent is needed?

jancsika 6y ago

Is it against the rules for me to use HN as a dating site? I'm going to pen-test it: I enjoy cuddling, long walks on the beach, and services that do not run social experiments on me like something out of a cheap movie plot about a mad-scientist. to contact this user please dial "jancsika" on your rotary phone now

neonological 6y ago
This is a psychological experiment on me and all the users on this site and I am now outraged.
alfl 6y ago
You asked our permission so unfortunately this experiment is not comparable with Facebook’s.
- jancsika 6y ago
  Fortunately and wittingly it is not comparable!

sidcool 6y ago

Facebook has indeed done much harm to individuals and the society as a whole. But at the same time, their tenacity to continue making money is impressive. Villiams too have some quaint evil power.

jimbob45 6y ago

I don’t know anyone that uses Facebook anymore that likes it. Everyone I know who uses it says, “I’m thinking I should delete it soon”. Universally, the number one criticism is, “All I ever wanted to see are my friends’ posts and every update shows me less and less of those”. Does anyone actually know people who avidly use and love Facebook? It seems like Facebook is like the Christian church where the church and everyone says they go every Sunday but it’s really more like once a year at this point.

alistairSH 6y ago
Same boat here. Wife deleted her account. I keep mine only to use the market (currently, the best place to sell bicycle parts locally). I'll probably delete my account once I do my next round of parts bin purging.

throw7 6y ago

"Anyone using facebook is a dumb fuck." - Mark Zuckerberg

jb775 6y ago

I noticed during the election that whenever I glanced at the fb "watch" video section, it was videos of guys getting into fist fights, or videos containing disturbing violence. I don't ever watch or search for videos like this, so it's not like it was selected based on my watch history or something. At the time, I figured it was a psychological trick to suck me into viewing more ads since violence has that "can't look away" nature to it...but now that I think about it, they could have been intentionally stirring up angry emotions within the general population during the election cycle. Anyone else notice this?

bob33212 6y ago
I rarely use facbook but when I do they show me some woodworking projects. I have never said anything about woodworking or joined any wordworking groups on facebook. They are just making a guess that someone like me would find those interesting.
- beforeolives 6y ago
  You're breaking some data scientist's heart by calling their model "just making a guess".
tittenfick 6y ago
Social media algorithms are designed to show you things which make you upset because that type of content is highly likely to "engage."
- dbtc 6y ago
  aren’t they designed to optimize for most engagement, in whichever way they can (which turns out to be with upsetting content)? Or are people actually selecting specifically upsetting stuff?
  - tittenfick 6y ago
    Yes, they are designed to select for most engagement, regardless of the content.

ACow_Adonis 6y ago

I admit confusion. isn't unsolicited experimental psychological manipulation without consent just another word for most modern marketing? I mean don't get me wrong, I dont like it and try to exclude it from my life and my families life, but there's pretty wide acceptance socially for this type of behaviour. I would of thought the beauty industry would be an old perpetrator that should generally be investigated. going to shut down that? and negatively instilling fear and distrust in a population without their consent for personal gain is about as old as politics itself? isn't this practically mainstream media behaviour? fomo? status anxiety? conspicuous consumption? I don't see why Facebook should be singled out for society-wide mandated and culturally supported practices.

luckylion 6y ago

"News media deliberately make people outraged. This ought to be the final straw". I don't have issues with the study in general. You do want to know whether and how you can influence people in a positive or negative way, especially if you want to avoid it. There's really no other way to find out than to study it. They should've gotten clear consent for participation in that study, but that's about it from my point of view.

seoaeu 6y ago
"There was nothing wrong except for the lack of consent" is really rather missing the point... In other contexts that's the difference between acceptable behavior and a felony.
- luckylion 6y ago
  I don't understand the article (and most of the comments) to be about the lack of consent, but about the act itself: deliberately making people sad. In most medical studies, that's not being done. You might give someone placebos and watch what happens when you don't give them the medication you want to test, but you're not giving people cancer to see what helps best. I'm not sure consent would've made a fundamental difference to that reaction to it.

alfl 6y ago

When they announced that they had this capability a couple of years ago I deleted my account.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

aasasd 6y ago

In related news, to keep their job or occupy their time, journalists and social media commenters continue pretending that web users have self-respect.

fogof 6y ago

How sad did this experiment really make people? The chart in the study says that people who saw fewer positive posts used one percent fewer positive words and about 0.3% more negative words. But on the other hand, they were seeing fewer positive posts, so maybe they were just replying to the posts they saw in a way that was natural, without their inner emotional state being very affected.

seattle_spring 6y ago
Excuse me, but this is the HN bi-hourly "Facebook is evil" post (tm). Questioning the content is against the rules.
- pindab0ter 6y ago
  There’s no need for this.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - bryan_w 6y ago
    I mean it is a bit odd that this is from 2012 and was reposted today. It's almost like it was posted because there hadn't been a negative story in while
imwillofficial 6y ago
Does it matter?

dhosek 6y ago

9 years later and still a whole lot of straw left.

d3ntb3ev1l 6y ago

In other news, the ocean is wet

imwillofficial 6y ago

What if somebody had killed themselves? This type of unconsensual experimentation is criminal.

wruza 6y ago

Honestly that sounds like “this stuff dealer is bad because they make people sad while they wait for a dose; I quit, clean for 2d 6h 19min”. No doubt facebook is evil, corporate monster, etc, but hey what about stopping being a junkie. The problem is not someone experimenting with your unhealthy addiction, it is your unhealthy addiction. At the early stages of the internet, most of the content was hidden, waiting for you to actively discover and bookmark it. Like you do with good places in your town - you find one, add it to your address book and visit occasionally. It was a slow process, full of findings, enjoyment and variety. Now everyone seems to sit at their mailbox, desperately waiting for another pack of junk mail to arrive. Facebook is just that - a postman who chooses from a variety of crap to push into your inbox. It doesn’t change lives unless people are too lazy to live by themselves.

xg15 6y ago
> The problem is not someone experimenting with your unhealthy addiction, it is your unhealthy addiction. Why is it my unhealthy addiction if a multi-billion dollar company uses all tools at their disposal to push me into said addiction?
- wruza 6y ago
  I mean, it’s not their addiction and not their problem. Everyone tries to push/trick/force you into it, from drug cartels to facebook. You can’t do much with neither of them for a variety of reasons, thus it sounds reasonable to perceive it as something that you should refrain from by yourself. And you can do that even without Quitting Facebook, just bookmark an url that has no feed in it. Personally I’m not using facebook, but e.g. youtube always tries to push me into viewing something. But I simply do not scroll the feed, and go to subs or search instead when I want something new. Only user’s laziness allows them to take control, and only a user is in control of their laziness. All of those who complain about the modern internet forget that old internet required you to “surf” it very actively. FAANG exists as a multi-trillion industry only because people are inert content junkies with a thumb.
  - xg15 6y ago

postpurchase 6y ago

I've given up social media, it's been fantastic.

xg15 6y ago

> But the issue of consent also doesn't quite explain why we're comfortable with some types of uninformed research on us, but not others. Like almost every major tech firm, Facebook practices A/B testing Are "we" actually comfortable with that practice? (And who is "we" in the first place? The general public? Tech people? Journalists?) It seems to me, this is simply something the industry does because it can get away with it - and most users don't object because they don't even know it's happening. Why tech journalists see the Facebook thing as objectionable but A/B tests without consent as perfectly fine might be a question worth discussing.

niyikiza 6y ago

Perhaps some A/B testing at The Guardian showed that headlines condemning tech giants are more clickable.

mgraczyk 6y ago

As a former FB employee who worked on ranking, I just want to point out how absolutely tiny the effect size is here when we think about normal human emotional experience. On a per person basis, this experiment had an effect that is comparable to other potential changes like slightly altering the padding on the "like" button, or showing 1 extra news post per day, or sending an extra notification once per month. Facebook didn't make people sad. It made a population post things with slightly more negative words, only significant when measured across hundreds of thousands of users.