19 ms·

Facebook's unethical experiment manipulated users' emotions

130 points by cmrivers 12y ago

hawkice 12y ago
Every business that makes sense will try to make its customers happier. Showing people bad news to get more engagement has roughly the same moral standing as the evening news. I guess I don't get it. [It must be wrong because they learned something from it, I guess?]
- walterbell 12y ago
  What's your position on creating fake news to get more engagement? Some lines are defended because the slippery slope on the other side is infinite.
  - hawkice 12y ago
    I'm opposed to lying, I don't imagine that's controversial. If the slope is so slippery smooth there has got to be a point in between changing the details of an arbitrarily complex sort and filter default on a social network site and purposely propagating lies.
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
      Well, where is it when not where you are purposely changing those sort and filter defaults with the explicit goal of changing people's perception of the world in a way intentionally not in line with their interest?
  - cwyers 12y ago
    The thing about the slippery slope is that it is far more often a logical fallacy than it is a real danger.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      http://pando.com/2014/06/28/facebooks-science-experiment-on-users-shows-the-company-is-more-even-powerful-and-unethical-than-we-thought/ http://pando.com/2014/06/28/facebooks-science-experiment-on-... "Facebook itself could target certain users, whether they be corporate rivals or current/former employees. Having such strong psychological control over your workforce would certainly have its benefits. And if Facebook ever gets caught? Why, the company could claim it’s all part of a social experiment, one that users tacitly agreed to when they signed up. With over one-tenth of the world’s population signing into Facebook every day, and now with evidence to back the emotional power of the company’s algorithmic manipulation, the possibilities for widespread social engineering are staggering and unlike anything the world has seen. Granted, Facebook’s motives probably are simply to convince people to buy more stuff in order to please advertisers, but the potential uses of that power to impact elections or global trade could be enticing to all sorts of powerful interest groups."
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
      The thing about fallacies is that you can't claim one just because it's common. The thing about this case is that network effects of communication services make for very strong path dependence, thus making it extremely hard to get back up the slope a bit if you notice you've been slipping down a bit too much.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Well that's pretty much every news portal out there, for the definition of 'fake' as 'not matching reality'.
ajays 12y ago
I'm puzzled about the outrage. FB _already_ filters out updates based on some blackbox algorithm. So they tweaked the parameters of that algorithm to filter out the "happier" updates, and observed what happens. How is this unethical? The updates were posted by the users' friends! FB didn't manufacture the news items; they were always there. I detest FB as much as the next guy, but this is ridiculous.
- masnick 12y ago
  Human subjects research has ethical obligations that at times go beyond what seems like common sense, but are still really important because of past ethical abuses. See http://www.maxmasnick.com/2014/06/28/facebook/ http://www.maxmasnick.com/2014/06/28/facebook/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7959941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7959941 In this case, I don't think there was actual risk but just reading the PNAS paper it doesn't sound like the study went through the proper process. If it was reviewed by an IRB then it did go through the proper process and it's ethically sound, but a PR nightmare.
  - azakai 12y ago
    Facebook altering it's block-box proprietary algorithm for what to show is something it does every day. That can't be unethical by itself. It's possible that for it to be published, a higher standard would be needed. That is, the actions they took were ethical, but perhaps inappropriate for scientific publication. But, if that were the case, the peer reviewers and the journal in which it was published should have flagged that. That it was published shows they didn't have any significant concerns.
    - masnick 12y ago
      > It's possible that for it to be published, a higher standard would be needed. That is, the actions they took were ethical, but perhaps inappropriate for scientific publication. > But, if that were the case, the peer reviewers and the journal in which it was published should have flagged that. That it was published shows they didn't have any significant concerns. This would not be a scientific ethics issue if they explained their IRB review in the manuscript. It is so unusual to not do this that it is a reasonable assumption something funny is going on, in my experience. For example, the journal could be incentivized to look the other way in order to publish a high publicity article. I'm NOT saying that's what PNAS did, but just because something is published doesn't mean it's ethical. (See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20137807 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20137807)
dreamfactory2 12y ago
> "If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that’s experimentation" Or art, or journalism, or advertising, or football etc.
espeed 12y ago
Facebook’s Unethical Experiment: It intentionally manipulated users’ emotions without their knowledge. I'm not defending Facebook or the experiment, but if you're going to call them out for "manipulating users' emotions without their knowledge", then you need to call out every advertising, marketing, and PR firm on the planet, along with every political talkshow, campaign, sales letter, and half-time speech...
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- pain 12y ago
  With that in mind, I'd find it important if our social media analytics publicly accounted for such emotional manipulations. It could be wise to begin to share such emotional-information influences to equally let users and admins be so sensitive (and acknowledge its a real part of our systems).
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    There's a caveat though; a study can be only made if people are unaware they're being subjects of it.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Do you have other examples of studies (which changed the user in some way) that were involuntary?
      - TeMPOraL 12y ago
        Pretty much every study? Most of the important psychological studies tend to follow a pattern where scientists tell the participants that they're doing X (e.g. measuring their control of body parts when drunk) while actually measuring a completely different Y (half of the group were given fake, non-alcoholic drinks; the goal of the study was to check how much of drunken behavior comes from you knowing that you drink alcohol). You can't get good results if your subjects know what you're testing for.
masnick 12y ago
I just wrote a blog post about the ethical/professional obligations of the researchers associated with this study: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2014/06/28/facebook/ http://www.maxmasnick.com/2014/06/28/facebook/ When you publish a paper, you are supposed to write in the body of the manuscript if it's been approved by an IRB and what their ruling was. I'm surprised it was published without this, even though it apparently was? It's also appropriate to address ethical issues head-on in a paper about a study that may be controversial from an ethical perspective. If it really was approved by an IRB, then the researchers are ethically in the clear but totally botched the PR. If not, then I think the study was not ethical.
- chmullig 12y ago
  It was approved by an IRB.
deepsun 12y ago
Author falsely assumes that people changes their sharing behavior due to changes in their mood. More likely they just feel like "everyone's posting cats on Facebook, so that's a place for sharing cats, let me do too", or otherwise.
kyro 12y ago
To say this response is unnecessary and unfounded is disingenuous. Marc Andreessen (whom I respect) tweeted "Run a web site, measure anything, make any changes based on measurements? Congratulations, you're running a psychology experiment!" I could not disagree more. This isn't simply a matter of looking at metrics and making changes to increase conversion rates. The problem is that the whole of users have come to expect Facebook to be a place where they can see any and all of their friends' updates. When I look at an ad, I know I am being manipulated. I know I'm being sold something. There is no such expectation of manipulative intent of Facebook, or that they're curating your social feed beyond "most recent" and "most popular", which seemingly have little to do with post content and are filters they let you toggle. What FB has done is misrepresent people and the lives they've chosen to portray, having a hand in shaping their online image. I want to see the good and the bad that my friends post. I want to know that whatever my mom or brother or friend posts, I'll be able to see. Someone's having a bad day? I want to see it and support that person. That's what's so great about social media, that whatever I post can reach everyone in my circle, the way I posted it, unedited, unfiltered. To me this is a disagreement between what people perceive FB to be and how FB views itself. What if Twitter started filtering out tweets that were negative or critical of others?
- madeofpalk 12y ago
  > place where they can see any and all of their friends' updates. But that's the thing - Facebook have been manipulating your feed for years based on what it thought you would be interested in: favoring popular posts, posts from those you interact with frequently, posts that it thinks could be popular etc. There's always been 'most recent' which is a more accurate timeline, and as far as I know Facebook never manipulated that. While I neither agree nor disagree with whether the study was right or not, it wasnt with this study that they 'misrepresented people and their lives'. Facebook has been doing that for years!
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - walterbell 12y ago
    The consequences of an activity are context dependent. http://civic.mit.edu/blog/petey/betraying-expectations-in-user-generated-censorship http://civic.mit.edu/blog/petey/betraying-expectations-in-us... "I've begun to think that if you, like me, found yourself surprised by these case studies, or nodding along with them as variations on a familiar theme of “gaming the system,” then it is because we came to the cases expecting or wanting something else. Some baseline behavior which ought to have been in action, some baseline norm which ought to have been observed, but wasn’t, rendering the results of the process suspect, “altered,” “manipulated,” “unnatural,” relative to some unaltered, unmanipulated, natural baseline, which would exist but for sin and sinners. But what are these baselines? Where do they come from? These are not, as they say, purely academic questions. The answers not only explain why we find some behavior problematic: they create the very possibility of the problem itself. The opportunity for subversion arises from the gap between intended and actual use of a system. James Grimmelmann once wrote that “if we must imagine intellectual property law, it must also imagine us.” When engineers design social systems they must imagine both possible uses and devise methods to make sure the uses are producing desired results, endlessly iterating upon the real to move it closer to the ideal."
onewaystreet 12y ago
Been kind of surprised there hasn't been more of a reaction to this. I guess the Internet has reached peak Facebook outrage.
danso 12y ago
FWIW, the HN discussion on the study published on PNAS here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470
- dang 12y ago
  Yes, and today's wave of media controversy about it hasn't added significant new information, so I think this post counts as a dupe.
  - staunch 12y ago
    Heavens forbid the fluff piece on a Google executive gets pushed down the page. I'm dumbfounded that you would kill this story. Hacker News is changing.
    - dang 12y ago
      Well, it was a borderline call, so I've restored the thread. Perhaps I should explain our thought process. There were at least half a dozen major web publications today putting out variants of this indignant post about "Facebook's unethical experiment". Did all these authors suddenly develop a passion for science ethics? Of course not. It is simply the internet controversy du jour. Those have never made for good HN stories, and the policy has always been to penalize them, because otherwise they would dominate the site. In cases of pile-on controversy like this one, when the original story has already been discussed on HN—which is pretty common, because HN users tend not to miss a day in posting these things—we usually mark the follow-up posts as dupes unless they add important new information, or at least something of substance. Does this article add anything of substance? It didn't strike me that way, but arguably it does. As for the PR fluff piece you think is on the front page, why haven't you flagged it? It's impossible for us to catch (or even see) all such things. We rely on users to point them out.
      - staunch 12y ago
        The idea that this story is "controversy du jour" is wrong in my view. I think it's an incredibly important story and the underlying issue may be the biggest in technology. At the very least it is not spam, gossip, or other obvious junk. The explicit HN policy used to be to allow controversies like this to wash over the site. We all remember seeing the home page covered in many submissions on the same topic. The fear that this would cause a topic to "dominate the site" has been proven false numerous times. I'm not sure why that would be a consideration. I wasn't objecting to the puff piece on the home page. I don't think lightweight stuff like that can dominate the site either.
resdirector 12y ago
> Facebook intentionally made thousands upon thousands of people sad. Hang on. Wasn't the experiment to see whether users would post gloomier or happier messages respectively? This very different from intentionally making people sad.
- staunch 12y ago
  "I only silently removed happiness from your life because I was curious what your reaction would be!"
  - csallen 12y ago
    Silently removed happiness from my web application that you visit on a voluntary basis. If you think my web app is too gloomy, feel free to stop coming.
    - staunch 12y ago
      What if Gmail started silently removing happy emails from your Inbox by auto-archiving them?
      - TeMPOraL 12y ago
        You expect GMail to show you every non-spam message sent to you in your inbox. On Facebook, on the other hand, you expect a curated list of recent posts - otherwise you wouldn't be able to keep up with what your 500+ friends and 1500+ liked pages post every day. So comparing GMail to Facebook makes no sense at all.
        staunch 12y ago
        Gmail users have an expectation that Google won't start silently diverting their legitimate email as an experiment on them. That's the comparison if you didn't quite grasp that. You're claiming that users would "expect" Facebook to do something like filter out all the happy posts from their friends and family without telling them? I don't think many would agree with you.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
I strongly hope that they won't care about any of this "outrage" and continue to do more and more experiments. Maybe even open it up as a platform for scientists to conduct studies. Facebook is in the unique position of possessing data that can be orders of magnitude more useful for social studies than surveys of randomly picked college students that happened to pass through your hallway. There's lot of good to be made from it. But the bigger issue I see here is why it's unethical to "manipulate user emotions" for research, when every salesman, every ad agency, every news portal and every politician does this to the much bigger extent and it's considered fair? It doesn't make much sense for me (OTOH I have this attitude, constantly backed by experience, that everything a salesmen says is a malicious lie until proven otherwise).
- DanAndersen 12y ago
  It's an interesting question. I have the same averse reaction to this story that a lot of people here have, but I admit I also thought, "If Facebook hadn't published this as research, but just had it as a business decision to drive more usage or positive associations with the website, no one would care." My own way to reconcile this -- and I admit it's not a mainstream view -- is that advertisement and salesmanship should be considered just as unethical. I don't know how to quantify what "over the line" is, but it all feels like brain-hacking. Things like "The Century of the Self" suggest that in the past century or so we've become extremely good at finding the little tricks and failings of human cognition and taking advantage of vulnerabilities of our reasoning to inject the equivalent of malicious code. The problem is that when I say "we" I don't mean the average person, and there's an every-growing asymmetry. Like malware developers adapting faster than anti-malware developers, most people have the same level of defense that they always have had, while the "attackers" have gotten better and better at breaking through defenses. Sometimes I'll see discussions about "what will people centuries from now think was crazy about our era?" and there's a part of me that keeps coming back to the idea that the act of asymmetrically exploiting the faults of human thinking is considered normal and "just the way things are."
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    > My own way to reconcile this -- and I admit it's not a mainstream view -- is that advertisement and salesmanship should be considered just as unethical. I agree with that, or probably think even more strongly - that advertisements/sales are more unethical than research. It's difficult to put limits though, because even if many salesmen clearly act maliciously, pretty much everything you do or say influences people this way or another; it's how we communicate. What I'd love to see is Facebook creating an opt-in option for an user to be a part of further sociological research. I'd gladly turn it on and be happy that I'm helping humanity, while Facebook could limit their studies to people who explicitly consented (there's an issue with selection bias though). They have too good data to be not used for the betterment of mankind.
pvdm 12y ago
Another nail in the FB coffin. Edit: for me at least.
- jqm 12y ago
  And only 90,000 more nails to go before your average non-tech user who has Facebook as their homepage drops them. Until a replacement comes about and a large number of contacts move, it has become such a large part of these peoples lives it isn't going anywhere. Arguments and reasons don't sway them. Sadly. I've never even been on facebook. But my girlfriend and extended family use it religiously. My dad and a couple of other members finally dropped it as the result of my rants but the rest (the vast majority) just think I'm suspicious and nutty and go right on posting their entire lives. So, facebook can pretty much do as they please. And apparently they do.
azakai 12y ago
Oh, please. Every single time Facebook changes anything on their site it "manipulates users' emotions". Show more content from their friends? Show less? Show more from some friends? Show one type of content more, another less? Change the font? Enlarge/shrink thumbnail images? All these things affect users on all levels, including emotionally, and Facebook does such changes every day. Talking about "informed consent" in the context of a "psychological experiment" here is bizarre. The "subjects" of the "experiment" here are users of Facebook. They decided to use Facebook, and Facebook tweaks the content it shows them every single day. They expect that. That is how Facebook and every other site on the web (that is sophisticated enough to do studies on user behavior) works. If this is "immoral", then an website outage - which frustrates users hugely - should be outright evil. And shutting down a service would be an atrocity. Of course all of these are ludicrous. The only reason we are talking about this is because it was published, so all of a sudden it's "psychological research", which is a context rife with ethical limitations. But make no mistake - Facebook and all other sophisticated websites do such "psychological research" ALL THE TIME. It's how they optimize their content to get people to spend more time on their sites, or spend more money, or whatever they want. If anyone objects to this, they object to basically the entire modern web.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Exactly. I find this situation to be an example of ridiculous pattern matching. Is it published? Then it's a psychological experiment, and needs to be evaluated by an ethics board. Is it just A/B testing? Then it's not "science", so no need for ethics board.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    So as long as you aren't publishing the results of your experimentation, none of the ethics that apply to experimenting on humans apply? That's an...interesting...theory.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Well that seems to me to be a core issue here. Otherwise, you'd need to get IRB permission for every A/B test you do on your website.
mabbo 12y ago
155,000 users for each treatment of the experiment, says the paper. Let's presume random selection, and that the occurrence rate of mental disorders is the same for Facebook users as the general public (probably not too far off). Then Facebook intentionally downgraded the emotional state of: 10,000 sufferers of Major Depressive Disorder 5,000 people with PTSD 4,000 bipolar disorder sufferers 1,700 schizophrenics and a plethora of others with various mental disorders. 11/100,000 people commit suicide each year in America. How many were part of that treatment of the experiment, without consent or knowledge? As a scientist, I'm fascinated by the research. As a human being, I'm horrified it was ever done. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental-disorders-in-america/index.shtml http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-coun...
- walterbell 12y ago
  > How many were part of that treatment of the experiment, without consent or knowledge? How would this be determined in offline experiments where people volunteered?
  - Blahah 12y ago
    All subjects would have the potential consequences explained to them so they could make an informed decision about whether to take part. Informed consent is a very important ethical principle in human-subject experiments.
- MarkPNeyer 12y ago
  hi, i'm one of the people you're worried about. i have bipolar disorder, and i barely made it through an intense schizoaffective episode where i heard many voices, felt like my consciousness was splitting into multiple parts, and was terrified. this was just two months after my startup exited and i got nothing in 2012. oh yeah - i'm also a startup founder, worked at uber, google and microsoft - now facebook. i don't speak for them. just me. i'd like the world to understand me better. so much of what i've struggled with is mood-based. you know that guy - http://www.losethos.com/ http://www.losethos.com/ - i know _exactly_ what he means. i understand him when i hear him speak, and i feel bad for the guy. it's scary being where he is, "knowing" how powerful and right you must be, and knowing how people laugh at you behind our back - but you know you're right, that you're a conduit for god. do you think it makes sense for him to be stuck like that? i sure as hell don't. i'm sorry, i'm getting emotional here. this is hard for me. i can't speak for my employer here. but i will tell you that your mindset of me as a victim who must not be upset - it can be more than a little offensive. fortunately through all of my experience dealing with these issues, i've learned how to better manage my emotional states, and i've also learned to see emotion as form of sensory input - like light and sound. i don't believe everything i hear, or see - why should i believe everything i think or feel? if facebook was making up random shit that was negative and showing it to their users - that sucks. if they were making falsely positive posts - forging your friends activity - that also sucks. but when they are selectively showing you portions of your friends' activity - something they were already doing anyway - it's wrong to say that they have "intentionally downgraded " my emotional state. if my friend says she's having a shitty day, she's not intentionally downgrading my state. she's having a bad day. if facebook hides that from me, are they making my day better? are they making her day worse? it's not really clear here. people know facebook adjusts their posts, and they did show that people who are exposed to negative content are less likely to post positive things. does this mean that the users are themselves feeling less positive? or are they just trying to keep with the tone of the social area they're in? it's not sure. our culture does not understand emotion - i think this is a serious problem and we really need to do something about it. that templeOS guy is not enjoying life or functioning nearly as well as he could if he were not shunned for being so wildly antisocial. you know who else gets shunned for being antisocial? people who say things like 'i am sad', 'i feel lonely,' etc etc, in public. i'm sorry for the tone of this - it's - it's hard for me to stay calm here. but let's look at this as if emotion were the "same kind of thing" as light or sound. spreading a negative emotional reaction to this article and saying you are "horrified" that someone who was depressed had more people see their depressed posts - you're contributing to the problem. it feels to me that emotion has some 'conservation' like properties; you can't diminish a lot of negative emotion at once. it also seems to 'move' places; negative emotion between people who interact seems to get pushed to scary places where lots of fear and hate are concentrated. in late 2012 i felt like all of the evil in the world, all of the hate was being shoved into me because i told the world i could take it, i told the world i didn't want them to hurt like i did. i heard voices telling me to kill, and i wanted to kill myself rather than hurt someone else. i thouht icould take myself and the voices out with me - and then i'd heard the voice of my parents and loved ones calling to me. when i see those shootings, where some loser with no friends and no hope goes out and kills a bunch of people - i feel like it happened to them, and rather than blame themselves for the horrible shit being pushed on them, they blamed the outside world. but they're just as much victims - we're all victims - of our misunderstanding of emotion. i'm sorry, i know you didn't ask for me to be upset at you, i know oyu mean well, i'm just. i'm tired. i want people to understand this stuff better because the better i've come to understand it, the better i've functioned in life. the ability to remain calm - an ability i have not exercised here because it impedes the ability to express genuine content - that ability is invaluable and a huge source of power. energy moves from a heat reservoir, a bunch of pissed off angry furious people, to a cold rerservoir - a room full of sociopaths who use fear and anger to extract energy from a warmer place, the heat engine carnot-cycle of samsara and the transition from golden age to successsive yugas is just adiabatic/isothermic expansion and contraction of emtional content shit this is making no sense. so you see where i'm going - i'd like to understand this stuff better. i hope the study helps.
xyclos 12y ago
people still use facebook?
mryall 12y ago
The difference between this experiment and advertising or A/B testing is _intent_. With A/B testing and advertising, the publisher is attempting to sway user behaviour toward purchasing or some other goal which is usually obvious to the user. With this experiment, Facebook are modifying the news feeds of their users specifically to affect their emotions, and then measure impact of that emotional change. The intention is to modify the feelings of users on the system, some negatively, some positively. Intentional messing with human moods like this purely for experimentation is the reason why ethics committees exist at research organisations, and why informed consent is required from participants in experiments. Informed consent in this case could have involved popping up a dialog to all users who were to be involved in the experiment, informing them that the presentation of information in Facebook would be changed in a way that might affect their emotions or mood. That is what you would expect of doctors and researchers when dealing with substances or activities that could adversely affects people's moods. We should expect no less from pervasive social networks like Facebook.
ispolin 12y ago
So does this mean that people can increase their happiness by using plugins that hide negative posts from their social media?
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
  Possibly, but only in the short run, as skewed perception of reality tends to have long-term negative consequences. Which is precisely one of the reasons why this kind of stuff is evil.
- DanBC 12y ago
  People can reduce their risk of suicide by using something that filters low-quality reporting of suicide from their timeline.
jevgeni 12y ago
Isn't Slate in the business of exactly that: manipulating their readers emotions?
- reality_czech 12y ago
  Yes, but they're better at it than Facebook. They've got a bunch of gullible illogical peasants about to ban A/B testing... or at least drive it underground. For the children.
nichodges 12y ago
Before and/or after the fact, research participants are made aware that they were part of a psychology experiment. I wonder if Facebook plans on alerting subjects of this experiment to their participation?
falconfunction 12y ago
I just use Facebook to bookmark youporn at this point
ianstallings 12y ago
You know why I think they are doing this? Because there have been studies showing that people are miserable on facebook (see below) and I think people are starting to pick up on it. So FB feels some pressure to lighten the mood a bit. But as usual they do it with the subtlety of a drunken fool. Also, the comparison to an A/B test is a false one. This is specifically to alter the moods of the user and test the results in a study, not to improve the users experience or determine which app version works better. Regarding the study mentioned above: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/the-real-reason-facebook-makes-us-unhappy.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/the-r...
mullingitover 12y ago
I have a feeling a lot of college courses on research methods are going to use this as an example of a grave ethics breach for years to come. With an experiment group as large as they used, statistically it's almost inevitable that someone in that group will commit suicide in the near future. If that person is in the group that was targeted for negative messages, even a rookie lawyer could make a sound case before a jury that Facebook's researchers have blood on their hands.
- MarkPNeyer 12y ago
  surely people have committed sucide after using facebook even without this study. is facebook guilty of that, too? you may argue that facebook was "trying to make people depressed" but that simply isn't true. what if showing more of my friends negative status updates actually _helps_ them? depressed people are shunned in our society; facebook gave a voice to the voiceless. that's wonderful!
  - mullingitover 12y ago
    > you may argue that facebook was "trying to make people depressed" but that simply isn't true. Legal culpability issues aside: did facebook manipulate people's emotions intentionally? Did they inform them that they were going to do this, and of the risks involved? Did they get their consent? If the answers to the last two questions aren't unequivocally yes, then facebook is in deep trouble. Edit: this also misses the problem that the subjects were never screened for their basical ability to give informed consent. Merely clicking through the ToS does not mean that you're not suffering from a mental illness that nullifies their agreement to the ToS. Lastly, this experiment clearly involved deception, since the test subjects weren't informed up-front that they were being manipulated. This is problematic[1] if the subjects weren't debriefed after the study: >It is stated in the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct set by the American Psychological Association, that psychologists may not conduct research that includes a deceptive compartment unless the act is justified by the value and the importance of the results of such study, provided that this could not be obtained in an alternative way. Moreover, the research should bear no potential harm to the subject as an outcome of deception, be it physical pain or emotional distress. Finally, a debriefing session is required in which the experimenter discloses to the subject the use of deception in the research he/she was part of and provides the subject with the option of withdrawing his/her data. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent#Deception http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent#Deception
mullingitover 12y ago
This study really makes me feel vindicated for unfollowing all of my friends along with every brand on facebook. I could've been part of the study but I'd never know, since the only way I see my friends' posts is to visit their pages directly where I can see them all unfiltered. I've been doing this for the past six months and it has dramatically improved the way I interact with the site. I can still get party invites and keep in touch with people, but I'm immune to the groupthink.
ameza 12y ago
I'm torn about this. In some ways, I can see how mental health issues can be detected which can hopefully help us avoid these horrifying events (mass shootings off the top of my head). But then again, I can see how the Army or the government in general can control any type of popular uprisings. FB, Twitter, etc have given us tools to connect and join in efforts to fix what is wrong (I'm thinking the Middle East though that can be said about the Tea Party or even Occupy movement). If the price is right, FB can hand over that power (i.e. NSA) or through these secret courts, the Army/government can have direct control of FB. It's crazy to think that this only occurs in countries like Russia and China but wake up America! This is happening here as well!

130 points by cmrivers 12y ago

Every business that makes sense will try to make its customers happier. Showing people bad news to get more engagement has roughly the same moral standing as the evening news. I guess I don't get it. [It must be wrong because they learned something from it, I guess?]

walterbell 12y ago
What's your position on creating fake news to get more engagement? Some lines are defended because the slippery slope on the other side is infinite.
- hawkice 12y ago
  I'm opposed to lying, I don't imagine that's controversial. If the slope is so slippery smooth there has got to be a point in between changing the details of an arbitrarily complex sort and filter default on a social network site and purposely propagating lies.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
    Well, where is it when not where you are purposely changing those sort and filter defaults with the explicit goal of changing people's perception of the world in a way intentionally not in line with their interest?
- cwyers 12y ago
  The thing about the slippery slope is that it is far more often a logical fallacy than it is a real danger.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    http://pando.com/2014/06/28/facebooks-science-experiment-on-users-shows-the-company-is-more-even-powerful-and-unethical-than-we-thought/ http://pando.com/2014/06/28/facebooks-science-experiment-on-... "Facebook itself could target certain users, whether they be corporate rivals or current/former employees. Having such strong psychological control over your workforce would certainly have its benefits. And if Facebook ever gets caught? Why, the company could claim it’s all part of a social experiment, one that users tacitly agreed to when they signed up. With over one-tenth of the world’s population signing into Facebook every day, and now with evidence to back the emotional power of the company’s algorithmic manipulation, the possibilities for widespread social engineering are staggering and unlike anything the world has seen. Granted, Facebook’s motives probably are simply to convince people to buy more stuff in order to please advertisers, but the potential uses of that power to impact elections or global trade could be enticing to all sorts of powerful interest groups."
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
    The thing about fallacies is that you can't claim one just because it's common. The thing about this case is that network effects of communication services make for very strong path dependence, thus making it extremely hard to get back up the slope a bit if you notice you've been slipping down a bit too much.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Well that's pretty much every news portal out there, for the definition of 'fake' as 'not matching reality'.

ajays 12y ago

I'm puzzled about the outrage. FB _already_ filters out updates based on some blackbox algorithm. So they tweaked the parameters of that algorithm to filter out the "happier" updates, and observed what happens. How is this unethical? The updates were posted by the users' friends! FB didn't manufacture the news items; they were always there. I detest FB as much as the next guy, but this is ridiculous.

masnick 12y ago
Human subjects research has ethical obligations that at times go beyond what seems like common sense, but are still really important because of past ethical abuses. See http://www.maxmasnick.com/2014/06/28/facebook/ http://www.maxmasnick.com/2014/06/28/facebook/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7959941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7959941 In this case, I don't think there was actual risk but just reading the PNAS paper it doesn't sound like the study went through the proper process. If it was reviewed by an IRB then it did go through the proper process and it's ethically sound, but a PR nightmare.
- azakai 12y ago
  Facebook altering it's block-box proprietary algorithm for what to show is something it does every day. That can't be unethical by itself. It's possible that for it to be published, a higher standard would be needed. That is, the actions they took were ethical, but perhaps inappropriate for scientific publication. But, if that were the case, the peer reviewers and the journal in which it was published should have flagged that. That it was published shows they didn't have any significant concerns.
  - masnick 12y ago
    > It's possible that for it to be published, a higher standard would be needed. That is, the actions they took were ethical, but perhaps inappropriate for scientific publication. > But, if that were the case, the peer reviewers and the journal in which it was published should have flagged that. That it was published shows they didn't have any significant concerns. This would not be a scientific ethics issue if they explained their IRB review in the manuscript. It is so unusual to not do this that it is a reasonable assumption something funny is going on, in my experience. For example, the journal could be incentivized to look the other way in order to publish a high publicity article. I'm NOT saying that's what PNAS did, but just because something is published doesn't mean it's ethical. (See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20137807 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20137807)

dreamfactory2 12y ago

> "If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that’s experimentation" Or art, or journalism, or advertising, or football etc.

espeed 12y ago

Facebook’s Unethical Experiment: It intentionally manipulated users’ emotions without their knowledge. I'm not defending Facebook or the experiment, but if you're going to call them out for "manipulating users' emotions without their knowledge", then you need to call out every advertising, marketing, and PR firm on the planet, along with every political talkshow, campaign, sales letter, and half-time speech...

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
pain 12y ago
With that in mind, I'd find it important if our social media analytics publicly accounted for such emotional manipulations. It could be wise to begin to share such emotional-information influences to equally let users and admins be so sensitive (and acknowledge its a real part of our systems).
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  There's a caveat though; a study can be only made if people are unaware they're being subjects of it.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Do you have other examples of studies (which changed the user in some way) that were involuntary?
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Pretty much every study? Most of the important psychological studies tend to follow a pattern where scientists tell the participants that they're doing X (e.g. measuring their control of body parts when drunk) while actually measuring a completely different Y (half of the group were given fake, non-alcoholic drinks; the goal of the study was to check how much of drunken behavior comes from you knowing that you drink alcohol). You can't get good results if your subjects know what you're testing for.

masnick 12y ago

I just wrote a blog post about the ethical/professional obligations of the researchers associated with this study: http://www.maxmasnick.com/2014/06/28/facebook/ http://www.maxmasnick.com/2014/06/28/facebook/ When you publish a paper, you are supposed to write in the body of the manuscript if it's been approved by an IRB and what their ruling was. I'm surprised it was published without this, even though it apparently was? It's also appropriate to address ethical issues head-on in a paper about a study that may be controversial from an ethical perspective. If it really was approved by an IRB, then the researchers are ethically in the clear but totally botched the PR. If not, then I think the study was not ethical.

chmullig 12y ago
It was approved by an IRB.

deepsun 12y ago

Author falsely assumes that people changes their sharing behavior due to changes in their mood. More likely they just feel like "everyone's posting cats on Facebook, so that's a place for sharing cats, let me do too", or otherwise.

kyro 12y ago

To say this response is unnecessary and unfounded is disingenuous. Marc Andreessen (whom I respect) tweeted "Run a web site, measure anything, make any changes based on measurements? Congratulations, you're running a psychology experiment!" I could not disagree more. This isn't simply a matter of looking at metrics and making changes to increase conversion rates. The problem is that the whole of users have come to expect Facebook to be a place where they can see any and all of their friends' updates. When I look at an ad, I know I am being manipulated. I know I'm being sold something. There is no such expectation of manipulative intent of Facebook, or that they're curating your social feed beyond "most recent" and "most popular", which seemingly have little to do with post content and are filters they let you toggle. What FB has done is misrepresent people and the lives they've chosen to portray, having a hand in shaping their online image. I want to see the good and the bad that my friends post. I want to know that whatever my mom or brother or friend posts, I'll be able to see. Someone's having a bad day? I want to see it and support that person. That's what's so great about social media, that whatever I post can reach everyone in my circle, the way I posted it, unedited, unfiltered. To me this is a disagreement between what people perceive FB to be and how FB views itself. What if Twitter started filtering out tweets that were negative or critical of others?

madeofpalk 12y ago
> place where they can see any and all of their friends' updates. But that's the thing - Facebook have been manipulating your feed for years based on what it thought you would be interested in: favoring popular posts, posts from those you interact with frequently, posts that it thinks could be popular etc. There's always been 'most recent' which is a more accurate timeline, and as far as I know Facebook never manipulated that. While I neither agree nor disagree with whether the study was right or not, it wasnt with this study that they 'misrepresented people and their lives'. Facebook has been doing that for years!
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- walterbell 12y ago
  The consequences of an activity are context dependent. http://civic.mit.edu/blog/petey/betraying-expectations-in-user-generated-censorship http://civic.mit.edu/blog/petey/betraying-expectations-in-us... "I've begun to think that if you, like me, found yourself surprised by these case studies, or nodding along with them as variations on a familiar theme of “gaming the system,” then it is because we came to the cases expecting or wanting something else. Some baseline behavior which ought to have been in action, some baseline norm which ought to have been observed, but wasn’t, rendering the results of the process suspect, “altered,” “manipulated,” “unnatural,” relative to some unaltered, unmanipulated, natural baseline, which would exist but for sin and sinners. But what are these baselines? Where do they come from? These are not, as they say, purely academic questions. The answers not only explain why we find some behavior problematic: they create the very possibility of the problem itself. The opportunity for subversion arises from the gap between intended and actual use of a system. James Grimmelmann once wrote that “if we must imagine intellectual property law, it must also imagine us.” When engineers design social systems they must imagine both possible uses and devise methods to make sure the uses are producing desired results, endlessly iterating upon the real to move it closer to the ideal."

onewaystreet 12y ago

Been kind of surprised there hasn't been more of a reaction to this. I guess the Internet has reached peak Facebook outrage.

danso 12y ago

FWIW, the HN discussion on the study published on PNAS here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7956470

dang 12y ago
Yes, and today's wave of media controversy about it hasn't added significant new information, so I think this post counts as a dupe.
- staunch 12y ago
  Heavens forbid the fluff piece on a Google executive gets pushed down the page. I'm dumbfounded that you would kill this story. Hacker News is changing.
  - dang 12y ago
    Well, it was a borderline call, so I've restored the thread. Perhaps I should explain our thought process. There were at least half a dozen major web publications today putting out variants of this indignant post about "Facebook's unethical experiment". Did all these authors suddenly develop a passion for science ethics? Of course not. It is simply the internet controversy du jour. Those have never made for good HN stories, and the policy has always been to penalize them, because otherwise they would dominate the site. In cases of pile-on controversy like this one, when the original story has already been discussed on HN—which is pretty common, because HN users tend not to miss a day in posting these things—we usually mark the follow-up posts as dupes unless they add important new information, or at least something of substance. Does this article add anything of substance? It didn't strike me that way, but arguably it does. As for the PR fluff piece you think is on the front page, why haven't you flagged it? It's impossible for us to catch (or even see) all such things. We rely on users to point them out.
    - staunch 12y ago
      The idea that this story is "controversy du jour" is wrong in my view. I think it's an incredibly important story and the underlying issue may be the biggest in technology. At the very least it is not spam, gossip, or other obvious junk. The explicit HN policy used to be to allow controversies like this to wash over the site. We all remember seeing the home page covered in many submissions on the same topic. The fear that this would cause a topic to "dominate the site" has been proven false numerous times. I'm not sure why that would be a consideration. I wasn't objecting to the puff piece on the home page. I don't think lightweight stuff like that can dominate the site either.

resdirector 12y ago

> Facebook intentionally made thousands upon thousands of people sad. Hang on. Wasn't the experiment to see whether users would post gloomier or happier messages respectively? This very different from intentionally making people sad.

staunch 12y ago
"I only silently removed happiness from your life because I was curious what your reaction would be!"
- csallen 12y ago
  Silently removed happiness from my web application that you visit on a voluntary basis. If you think my web app is too gloomy, feel free to stop coming.
  - staunch 12y ago
    What if Gmail started silently removing happy emails from your Inbox by auto-archiving them?
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      You expect GMail to show you every non-spam message sent to you in your inbox. On Facebook, on the other hand, you expect a curated list of recent posts - otherwise you wouldn't be able to keep up with what your 500+ friends and 1500+ liked pages post every day. So comparing GMail to Facebook makes no sense at all.
      - staunch 12y ago
        Gmail users have an expectation that Google won't start silently diverting their legitimate email as an experiment on them. That's the comparison if you didn't quite grasp that. You're claiming that users would "expect" Facebook to do something like filter out all the happy posts from their friends and family without telling them? I don't think many would agree with you.

TeMPOraL 12y ago

I strongly hope that they won't care about any of this "outrage" and continue to do more and more experiments. Maybe even open it up as a platform for scientists to conduct studies. Facebook is in the unique position of possessing data that can be orders of magnitude more useful for social studies than surveys of randomly picked college students that happened to pass through your hallway. There's lot of good to be made from it. But the bigger issue I see here is why it's unethical to "manipulate user emotions" for research, when every salesman, every ad agency, every news portal and every politician does this to the much bigger extent and it's considered fair? It doesn't make much sense for me (OTOH I have this attitude, constantly backed by experience, that everything a salesmen says is a malicious lie until proven otherwise).

DanAndersen 12y ago
It's an interesting question. I have the same averse reaction to this story that a lot of people here have, but I admit I also thought, "If Facebook hadn't published this as research, but just had it as a business decision to drive more usage or positive associations with the website, no one would care." My own way to reconcile this -- and I admit it's not a mainstream view -- is that advertisement and salesmanship should be considered just as unethical. I don't know how to quantify what "over the line" is, but it all feels like brain-hacking. Things like "The Century of the Self" suggest that in the past century or so we've become extremely good at finding the little tricks and failings of human cognition and taking advantage of vulnerabilities of our reasoning to inject the equivalent of malicious code. The problem is that when I say "we" I don't mean the average person, and there's an every-growing asymmetry. Like malware developers adapting faster than anti-malware developers, most people have the same level of defense that they always have had, while the "attackers" have gotten better and better at breaking through defenses. Sometimes I'll see discussions about "what will people centuries from now think was crazy about our era?" and there's a part of me that keeps coming back to the idea that the act of asymmetrically exploiting the faults of human thinking is considered normal and "just the way things are."
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  > My own way to reconcile this -- and I admit it's not a mainstream view -- is that advertisement and salesmanship should be considered just as unethical. I agree with that, or probably think even more strongly - that advertisements/sales are more unethical than research. It's difficult to put limits though, because even if many salesmen clearly act maliciously, pretty much everything you do or say influences people this way or another; it's how we communicate. What I'd love to see is Facebook creating an opt-in option for an user to be a part of further sociological research. I'd gladly turn it on and be happy that I'm helping humanity, while Facebook could limit their studies to people who explicitly consented (there's an issue with selection bias though). They have too good data to be not used for the betterment of mankind.

pvdm 12y ago

Another nail in the FB coffin. Edit: for me at least.

jqm 12y ago
And only 90,000 more nails to go before your average non-tech user who has Facebook as their homepage drops them. Until a replacement comes about and a large number of contacts move, it has become such a large part of these peoples lives it isn't going anywhere. Arguments and reasons don't sway them. Sadly. I've never even been on facebook. But my girlfriend and extended family use it religiously. My dad and a couple of other members finally dropped it as the result of my rants but the rest (the vast majority) just think I'm suspicious and nutty and go right on posting their entire lives. So, facebook can pretty much do as they please. And apparently they do.

azakai 12y ago

Oh, please. Every single time Facebook changes anything on their site it "manipulates users' emotions". Show more content from their friends? Show less? Show more from some friends? Show one type of content more, another less? Change the font? Enlarge/shrink thumbnail images? All these things affect users on all levels, including emotionally, and Facebook does such changes every day. Talking about "informed consent" in the context of a "psychological experiment" here is bizarre. The "subjects" of the "experiment" here are users of Facebook. They decided to use Facebook, and Facebook tweaks the content it shows them every single day. They expect that. That is how Facebook and every other site on the web (that is sophisticated enough to do studies on user behavior) works. If this is "immoral", then an website outage - which frustrates users hugely - should be outright evil. And shutting down a service would be an atrocity. Of course all of these are ludicrous. The only reason we are talking about this is because it was published, so all of a sudden it's "psychological research", which is a context rife with ethical limitations. But make no mistake - Facebook and all other sophisticated websites do such "psychological research" ALL THE TIME. It's how they optimize their content to get people to spend more time on their sites, or spend more money, or whatever they want. If anyone objects to this, they object to basically the entire modern web.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Exactly. I find this situation to be an example of ridiculous pattern matching. Is it published? Then it's a psychological experiment, and needs to be evaluated by an ethics board. Is it just A/B testing? Then it's not "science", so no need for ethics board.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  So as long as you aren't publishing the results of your experimentation, none of the ethics that apply to experimenting on humans apply? That's an...interesting...theory.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Well that seems to me to be a core issue here. Otherwise, you'd need to get IRB permission for every A/B test you do on your website.

mabbo 12y ago

155,000 users for each treatment of the experiment, says the paper. Let's presume random selection, and that the occurrence rate of mental disorders is the same for Facebook users as the general public (probably not too far off). Then Facebook intentionally downgraded the emotional state of: 10,000 sufferers of Major Depressive Disorder 5,000 people with PTSD 4,000 bipolar disorder sufferers 1,700 schizophrenics and a plethora of others with various mental disorders. 11/100,000 people commit suicide each year in America. How many were part of that treatment of the experiment, without consent or knowledge? As a scientist, I'm fascinated by the research. As a human being, I'm horrified it was ever done. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental-disorders-in-america/index.shtml http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-coun...

walterbell 12y ago
> How many were part of that treatment of the experiment, without consent or knowledge? How would this be determined in offline experiments where people volunteered?
- Blahah 12y ago
  All subjects would have the potential consequences explained to them so they could make an informed decision about whether to take part. Informed consent is a very important ethical principle in human-subject experiments.
MarkPNeyer 12y ago
hi, i'm one of the people you're worried about. i have bipolar disorder, and i barely made it through an intense schizoaffective episode where i heard many voices, felt like my consciousness was splitting into multiple parts, and was terrified. this was just two months after my startup exited and i got nothing in 2012. oh yeah - i'm also a startup founder, worked at uber, google and microsoft - now facebook. i don't speak for them. just me. i'd like the world to understand me better. so much of what i've struggled with is mood-based. you know that guy - http://www.losethos.com/ http://www.losethos.com/ - i know _exactly_ what he means. i understand him when i hear him speak, and i feel bad for the guy. it's scary being where he is, "knowing" how powerful and right you must be, and knowing how people laugh at you behind our back - but you know you're right, that you're a conduit for god. do you think it makes sense for him to be stuck like that? i sure as hell don't. i'm sorry, i'm getting emotional here. this is hard for me. i can't speak for my employer here. but i will tell you that your mindset of me as a victim who must not be upset - it can be more than a little offensive. fortunately through all of my experience dealing with these issues, i've learned how to better manage my emotional states, and i've also learned to see emotion as form of sensory input - like light and sound. i don't believe everything i hear, or see - why should i believe everything i think or feel? if facebook was making up random shit that was negative and showing it to their users - that sucks. if they were making falsely positive posts - forging your friends activity - that also sucks. but when they are selectively showing you portions of your friends' activity - something they were already doing anyway - it's wrong to say that they have "intentionally downgraded " my emotional state. if my friend says she's having a shitty day, she's not intentionally downgrading my state. she's having a bad day. if facebook hides that from me, are they making my day better? are they making her day worse? it's not really clear here. people know facebook adjusts their posts, and they did show that people who are exposed to negative content are less likely to post positive things. does this mean that the users are themselves feeling less positive? or are they just trying to keep with the tone of the social area they're in? it's not sure. our culture does not understand emotion - i think this is a serious problem and we really need to do something about it. that templeOS guy is not enjoying life or functioning nearly as well as he could if he were not shunned for being so wildly antisocial. you know who else gets shunned for being antisocial? people who say things like 'i am sad', 'i feel lonely,' etc etc, in public. i'm sorry for the tone of this - it's - it's hard for me to stay calm here. but let's look at this as if emotion were the "same kind of thing" as light or sound. spreading a negative emotional reaction to this article and saying you are "horrified" that someone who was depressed had more people see their depressed posts - you're contributing to the problem. it feels to me that emotion has some 'conservation' like properties; you can't diminish a lot of negative emotion at once. it also seems to 'move' places; negative emotion between people who interact seems to get pushed to scary places where lots of fear and hate are concentrated. in late 2012 i felt like all of the evil in the world, all of the hate was being shoved into me because i told the world i could take it, i told the world i didn't want them to hurt like i did. i heard voices telling me to kill, and i wanted to kill myself rather than hurt someone else. i thouht icould take myself and the voices out with me - and then i'd heard the voice of my parents and loved ones calling to me. when i see those shootings, where some loser with no friends and no hope goes out and kills a bunch of people - i feel like it happened to them, and rather than blame themselves for the horrible shit being pushed on them, they blamed the outside world. but they're just as much victims - we're all victims - of our misunderstanding of emotion. i'm sorry, i know you didn't ask for me to be upset at you, i know oyu mean well, i'm just. i'm tired. i want people to understand this stuff better because the better i've come to understand it, the better i've functioned in life. the ability to remain calm - an ability i have not exercised here because it impedes the ability to express genuine content - that ability is invaluable and a huge source of power. energy moves from a heat reservoir, a bunch of pissed off angry furious people, to a cold rerservoir - a room full of sociopaths who use fear and anger to extract energy from a warmer place, the heat engine carnot-cycle of samsara and the transition from golden age to successsive yugas is just adiabatic/isothermic expansion and contraction of emtional content shit this is making no sense. so you see where i'm going - i'd like to understand this stuff better. i hope the study helps.

xyclos 12y ago

people still use facebook?

mryall 12y ago

The difference between this experiment and advertising or A/B testing is _intent_. With A/B testing and advertising, the publisher is attempting to sway user behaviour toward purchasing or some other goal which is usually obvious to the user. With this experiment, Facebook are modifying the news feeds of their users specifically to affect their emotions, and then measure impact of that emotional change. The intention is to modify the feelings of users on the system, some negatively, some positively. Intentional messing with human moods like this purely for experimentation is the reason why ethics committees exist at research organisations, and why informed consent is required from participants in experiments. Informed consent in this case could have involved popping up a dialog to all users who were to be involved in the experiment, informing them that the presentation of information in Facebook would be changed in a way that might affect their emotions or mood. That is what you would expect of doctors and researchers when dealing with substances or activities that could adversely affects people's moods. We should expect no less from pervasive social networks like Facebook.

ispolin 12y ago

So does this mean that people can increase their happiness by using plugins that hide negative posts from their social media?

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 12y ago
Possibly, but only in the short run, as skewed perception of reality tends to have long-term negative consequences. Which is precisely one of the reasons why this kind of stuff is evil.
DanBC 12y ago
People can reduce their risk of suicide by using something that filters low-quality reporting of suicide from their timeline.

jevgeni 12y ago

Isn't Slate in the business of exactly that: manipulating their readers emotions?

reality_czech 12y ago
Yes, but they're better at it than Facebook. They've got a bunch of gullible illogical peasants about to ban A/B testing... or at least drive it underground. For the children.

nichodges 12y ago

Before and/or after the fact, research participants are made aware that they were part of a psychology experiment. I wonder if Facebook plans on alerting subjects of this experiment to their participation?

falconfunction 12y ago

I just use Facebook to bookmark youporn at this point

ianstallings 12y ago

You know why I think they are doing this? Because there have been studies showing that people are miserable on facebook (see below) and I think people are starting to pick up on it. So FB feels some pressure to lighten the mood a bit. But as usual they do it with the subtlety of a drunken fool. Also, the comparison to an A/B test is a false one. This is specifically to alter the moods of the user and test the results in a study, not to improve the users experience or determine which app version works better. Regarding the study mentioned above: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/the-real-reason-facebook-makes-us-unhappy.html http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/09/the-r...

mullingitover 12y ago

I have a feeling a lot of college courses on research methods are going to use this as an example of a grave ethics breach for years to come. With an experiment group as large as they used, statistically it's almost inevitable that someone in that group will commit suicide in the near future. If that person is in the group that was targeted for negative messages, even a rookie lawyer could make a sound case before a jury that Facebook's researchers have blood on their hands.

MarkPNeyer 12y ago
surely people have committed sucide after using facebook even without this study. is facebook guilty of that, too? you may argue that facebook was "trying to make people depressed" but that simply isn't true. what if showing more of my friends negative status updates actually _helps_ them? depressed people are shunned in our society; facebook gave a voice to the voiceless. that's wonderful!
- mullingitover 12y ago
  > you may argue that facebook was "trying to make people depressed" but that simply isn't true. Legal culpability issues aside: did facebook manipulate people's emotions intentionally? Did they inform them that they were going to do this, and of the risks involved? Did they get their consent? If the answers to the last two questions aren't unequivocally yes, then facebook is in deep trouble. Edit: this also misses the problem that the subjects were never screened for their basical ability to give informed consent. Merely clicking through the ToS does not mean that you're not suffering from a mental illness that nullifies their agreement to the ToS. Lastly, this experiment clearly involved deception, since the test subjects weren't informed up-front that they were being manipulated. This is problematic[1] if the subjects weren't debriefed after the study: >It is stated in the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct set by the American Psychological Association, that psychologists may not conduct research that includes a deceptive compartment unless the act is justified by the value and the importance of the results of such study, provided that this could not be obtained in an alternative way. Moreover, the research should bear no potential harm to the subject as an outcome of deception, be it physical pain or emotional distress. Finally, a debriefing session is required in which the experimenter discloses to the subject the use of deception in the research he/she was part of and provides the subject with the option of withdrawing his/her data. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent#Deception http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informed_consent#Deception

mullingitover 12y ago

This study really makes me feel vindicated for unfollowing all of my friends along with every brand on facebook. I could've been part of the study but I'd never know, since the only way I see my friends' posts is to visit their pages directly where I can see them all unfiltered. I've been doing this for the past six months and it has dramatically improved the way I interact with the site. I can still get party invites and keep in touch with people, but I'm immune to the groupthink.

ameza 12y ago

I'm torn about this. In some ways, I can see how mental health issues can be detected which can hopefully help us avoid these horrifying events (mass shootings off the top of my head). But then again, I can see how the Army or the government in general can control any type of popular uprisings. FB, Twitter, etc have given us tools to connect and join in efforts to fix what is wrong (I'm thinking the Middle East though that can be said about the Tea Party or even Occupy movement). If the price is right, FB can hand over that power (i.e. NSA) or through these secret courts, the Army/government can have direct control of FB. It's crazy to think that this only occurs in countries like Russia and China but wake up America! This is happening here as well!