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 tes

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-...