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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 #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.
    - babesh 6y ago
      Mark Zuckerberg - They “trust me”. Dumb fucks.
thatcat 6y ago
That's the definition of an unethical experiment design and would be considered academic misconduct if that were academic work. Regardless of intent, fb probably shouldn't be allowing front end devs to design psychological experiments at mass scale. https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Experimental_ethics https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Experimental_ethics
- plaidfuji 6y ago
  To be fair, the article states that the study was designed by a data scientist. Not that that implies that any additional ethical considerations were taken into account.
  - seattledev 6y ago
    Data scientist means someone who's had classes in stats and knows how to use software to analyze data. They don't cover how to run experiment and don't cover ethics
    - urthor 6y ago
      To be fair, the profile of a data scientist at a F500 non tech company and at a company like FB is slightly different. Facebook's data science crew is known for being heavier on the stats lighter on the software (relatively speaking) and probably can design a good experiment. That said, anyone who signs up for a job at Facebook doesn't give a shit about ethical design of experiments.
      - mgraczyk 6y ago
        Hi, I used to work on ML and ran experiments like this one at FB. Just want to point out that the effect of experiments like this on an individual is smaller than the effect of making the app start 0.1 seconds faster, or retraining the network used to filter hate speech. The only reason the effect is significant is because N>650k, so tiny effect sizes can be detected.
mhh__ 6y ago
> This company deliberately made people sad Which would be correct, surely?
- antiterra 6y ago
  Would you consider ‘this company deliberately made people happy’ to also be correct, then?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- Aunche 6y ago
  It's technically correct but implies malicious intent. It's like saying "Pfizer deliberately injected a substance in people that kills them" to describe a failed drug trial.
  - dheera 6y ago
    "it creates bad feelings" If this is the hypothesis they are testing for, the problem is they subjected people to a psychological experiment without consenting to it, for the ultimate purpose of their own financial gain. How is that not malicious intent?
    - eptcyka 6y ago
      If you dislike a _b_ version of an a/b tested site to the point that you feel deeply dissappinted by it, were the people who designed the experiment operating with a malicious intent? I don't think facebook engineers or data scientists care what people feel when they're adjusting their models, they only care about time spent on their platform or some other overly reductionist metric. One could argue that chasing super-efficiency will always result in abominations, but I think its hard to say that someone is doing something imoral by just doing the human equivalent of gradient descent in the optimization problem of driving engagement. That's not to say that we shouldn't have a conversation about this and not figure out ways to make these super efficient and powerful companies find ways to be satisfied with organic engagement.
tshaddox 6y ago
It seems like you’re implying that, by explaining in slightly more detail how this might have happened, you somehow show that the journalist was oversimplifying or distorting things. But, no, your last sentence is definitely still correct.
typon 6y ago
The constant derision of journalists in tech circles (especially on HN) is kind of shocking to see. Did you read the article or did you miss that the journalist is relaying fellow researchers' apprehensiveness about Facebook being allowed to conduct an unethical study. This article [1] is linked in the second paragraph. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-emotion-study-breached-ethical-guidelines-researchers-say https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  It's nothing personal against journalists, but the economics of the business mean that they have huge incentives to make things seem more outrageous or nefarious than they actually are. I did read the whole article, and that doesn't excuse the BS clickbait title of "Facebook deliberately made people sad." I find the fact that the article is complaining about emotional manipulation by Facebook, while using a deliberately manipulative title, to be more than a tad ironic.
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    Do journalists even write the titles to their own articles? I'm sure every newsroom has their own distinct culture, but this sounds like an editor's job.
- rendall 6y ago
  Questioning whether someone read the article is against the guidelines: > "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- antiterra 6y ago
  The commentary is more on the clickbait title, which very likely could have been written by someone other than the article’s author. (NB: journalists do A/B testing to pick the title that incites the most clicks from outrage[1].) Further, the article you link appears to have commentary by a single researcher. Here’s a writeup by researcher who thinks it wasn’t unethical at all and that it would have passed IRB as performed. It, of course, does not end the discussion, but it does demonstrate that the issue is more complex than a company deliberately making people sad: https://hbr.org/2014/07/were-okcupids-and-facebooks-experiments-unethical https://hbr.org/2014/07/were-okcupids-and-facebooks-experime... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/media-values-trust-study-api/2021/04/13/caa25edc-9bab-11eb-8005-bffc3a39f6d3_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/media-values-...
Graffur 6y ago
Why did you make this comment? Is it what you believe happened?

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.
  - babesh 6y ago
    Mark Zuckerberg - They “trust me”. Dumb fucks.

thatcat 6y ago

That's the definition of an unethical experiment design and would be considered academic misconduct if that were academic work. Regardless of intent, fb probably shouldn't be allowing front end devs to design psychological experiments at mass scale. https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Experimental_ethics https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Experimental_ethics

plaidfuji 6y ago
To be fair, the article states that the study was designed by a data scientist. Not that that implies that any additional ethical considerations were taken into account.
- seattledev 6y ago
  Data scientist means someone who's had classes in stats and knows how to use software to analyze data. They don't cover how to run experiment and don't cover ethics
  - urthor 6y ago
    To be fair, the profile of a data scientist at a F500 non tech company and at a company like FB is slightly different. Facebook's data science crew is known for being heavier on the stats lighter on the software (relatively speaking) and probably can design a good experiment. That said, anyone who signs up for a job at Facebook doesn't give a shit about ethical design of experiments.
    - mgraczyk 6y ago
      Hi, I used to work on ML and ran experiments like this one at FB. Just want to point out that the effect of experiments like this on an individual is smaller than the effect of making the app start 0.1 seconds faster, or retraining the network used to filter hate speech. The only reason the effect is significant is because N>650k, so tiny effect sizes can be detected.

mhh__ 6y ago

> This company deliberately made people sad Which would be correct, surely?

antiterra 6y ago
Would you consider ‘this company deliberately made people happy’ to also be correct, then?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Aunche 6y ago
It's technically correct but implies malicious intent. It's like saying "Pfizer deliberately injected a substance in people that kills them" to describe a failed drug trial.
- dheera 6y ago
  "it creates bad feelings" If this is the hypothesis they are testing for, the problem is they subjected people to a psychological experiment without consenting to it, for the ultimate purpose of their own financial gain. How is that not malicious intent?
  - eptcyka 6y ago
    If you dislike a _b_ version of an a/b tested site to the point that you feel deeply dissappinted by it, were the people who designed the experiment operating with a malicious intent? I don't think facebook engineers or data scientists care what people feel when they're adjusting their models, they only care about time spent on their platform or some other overly reductionist metric. One could argue that chasing super-efficiency will always result in abominations, but I think its hard to say that someone is doing something imoral by just doing the human equivalent of gradient descent in the optimization problem of driving engagement. That's not to say that we shouldn't have a conversation about this and not figure out ways to make these super efficient and powerful companies find ways to be satisfied with organic engagement.

tshaddox 6y ago

It seems like you’re implying that, by explaining in slightly more detail how this might have happened, you somehow show that the journalist was oversimplifying or distorting things. But, no, your last sentence is definitely still correct.

typon 6y ago

The constant derision of journalists in tech circles (especially on HN) is kind of shocking to see. Did you read the article or did you miss that the journalist is relaying fellow researchers' apprehensiveness about Facebook being allowed to conduct an unethical study. This article [1] is linked in the second paragraph. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-emotion-study-breached-ethical-guidelines-researchers-say https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
It's nothing personal against journalists, but the economics of the business mean that they have huge incentives to make things seem more outrageous or nefarious than they actually are. I did read the whole article, and that doesn't excuse the BS clickbait title of "Facebook deliberately made people sad." I find the fact that the article is complaining about emotional manipulation by Facebook, while using a deliberately manipulative title, to be more than a tad ironic.
- threatofrain 6y ago
  Do journalists even write the titles to their own articles? I'm sure every newsroom has their own distinct culture, but this sounds like an editor's job.
rendall 6y ago
Questioning whether someone read the article is against the guidelines: > "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
antiterra 6y ago
The commentary is more on the clickbait title, which very likely could have been written by someone other than the article’s author. (NB: journalists do A/B testing to pick the title that incites the most clicks from outrage[1].) Further, the article you link appears to have commentary by a single researcher. Here’s a writeup by researcher who thinks it wasn’t unethical at all and that it would have passed IRB as performed. It, of course, does not end the discussion, but it does demonstrate that the issue is more complex than a company deliberately making people sad: https://hbr.org/2014/07/were-okcupids-and-facebooks-experiments-unethical https://hbr.org/2014/07/were-okcupids-and-facebooks-experime... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/media-values-trust-study-api/2021/04/13/caa25edc-9bab-11eb-8005-bffc3a39f6d3_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/media-values-...

Graffur 6y ago

Why did you make this comment? Is it what you believe happened?