> I would argue that running a sale is benign compared to manipulating words in social media post to see how it influences your mood. What effect will that have

> I would argue that running a sale is benign compared to manipulating words in social media post to see how it influences your mood. What effect will that have on people with already fragile psyches? This is such a dumb or disingenuous position. Let's imagine you are a social media company, and these things happen: 1. people (researchers, media, doesn't matter) are reporting that they think the proliferation of negative sentiment on your social media is having a negative affect on user's moods. 2. based on your extensive experience and understanding of user behavior you think they are wrong. but still you recognize that if they are actually right it would be best for you to know that so you can make changes to fix it. 3. so, you decide to run an experiment where for some of the users you reduce the likelihood that they will see the types of posts that those researchers have identified as problematic, and you monitor the same sorts of signals that those researchers were looking at. 4. you get the results of your experiment. it doesn't actually matter what they say, if they say there's no effect, you now know that and apply it in the future, if they say there's a negative effect you try to mitigate it, if they say there's a positive effect maybe you try to amplify it. but really, that's not important because... 5. you tell people that you've done this research and made or not changes based on it. or it comes out in a leak that you did this by a disgruntled ex employee, or in a court case, also doesn't matter. 6. those same people as in (1), or others, frame the experiment you've done as a terrible thing where you were manipulating people's emotions for your own gain.