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Facebook’s Unethical Experiment: It intentionally manipulated users’ emotions without their knowledge. I'm not defending Facebook or the experiment, but if you

by 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.
      - walterbell 12y ago
        Since those participants did give consent to physically being _in_ a study, that's voluntary. If social norms within the test population (e.g. graduate students) are that pretty much every study tells participants they are doing X, but they end up doing Y, then people are clearly agreeing (consent, free will, expectation based on norms) that they won't know. The norms are a form of disclosure. What we have here are invisible, silent experiments that violate precedents and norms, without consent.
- espeed 12y ago
  Users aren't fed every post by every one of their friends -- users would be overwhelmed with posts flying by so fast they couldn't keep up -- so it's no secret FB tweaks its feed algorithm to keep users engaged. And experimenting with network effects is what social networks do. Every time you see a picture of someone you like it's like a little shot of dopamine goes off in your head. Facebook wants to optimize those dopamine shots to continually bump engagement and create an experience where everyone is habitually checking their feed every 10 mins. This type of behavior design/economics research is done by Dan Ariely at MIT ("Predictably Irrational" http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...) and the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab (http://captology.stanford.edu/ http://captology.stanford.edu/).
  - pain 12y ago
    Exactly why I'm trying to articulate importance of giving public facing language to such persuasive technologies, by actually having formal public markers for emotions being manipulated. (e.g. Apple ad with astericks linking to emotional signaling research and analytics, to help users determine deeper interests [this ad attracts people who feel X, Y, Z based on...]).
B-Con 12y ago
> 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... Except that in every one of those examples, you know you're being fed a worldview slanted by the author for their purpose. They may try to appear unbiased, but you still know that they have a worldview that is in their best interest to share. That makes it completely different.
- espeed 12y ago
  Except that in every one of those examples, you know you're being fed a worldview slanted by the author Not always. A perceptive person will know they're being bombarded with messages 24 hours a day, there's persuasion going on, and they may pick up on some of the more overt techniques; however, they won't always know the mechanisms at work or the entities behind the messages. For example, big PR firms often work behind the scenes to set the stage for large conglomerates. Unless you are actively engaged in trying to connect and analyze the message space, you won't see how a coordinated campaign's mosaic of messages coalesce over time and space. You won't be privy to all the facets of the push and pull in play. You might detect things like frame boundaries, but you won't always know what's omitted. And some things are only evident in hindsight. Only the most active and astute observers will be aware of the extent of it, and most people won't see any of it because they don't have the mental model for it.

by espeed 12y ago

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.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Since those participants did give consent to physically being _in_ a study, that's voluntary. If social norms within the test population (e.g. graduate students) are that pretty much every study tells participants they are doing X, but they end up doing Y, then people are clearly agreeing (consent, free will, expectation based on norms) that they won't know. The norms are a form of disclosure. What we have here are invisible, silent experiments that violate precedents and norms, without consent.
espeed 12y ago
Users aren't fed every post by every one of their friends -- users would be overwhelmed with posts flying by so fast they couldn't keep up -- so it's no secret FB tweaks its feed algorithm to keep users engaged. And experimenting with network effects is what social networks do. Every time you see a picture of someone you like it's like a little shot of dopamine goes off in your head. Facebook wants to optimize those dopamine shots to continually bump engagement and create an experience where everyone is habitually checking their feed every 10 mins. This type of behavior design/economics research is done by Dan Ariely at MIT ("Predictably Irrational" http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...) and the Stanford Persuasive Tech Lab (http://captology.stanford.edu/ http://captology.stanford.edu/).
- pain 12y ago
  Exactly why I'm trying to articulate importance of giving public facing language to such persuasive technologies, by actually having formal public markers for emotions being manipulated. (e.g. Apple ad with astericks linking to emotional signaling research and analytics, to help users determine deeper interests [this ad attracts people who feel X, Y, Z based on...]).

B-Con 12y ago

> 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... Except that in every one of those examples, you know you're being fed a worldview slanted by the author for their purpose. They may try to appear unbiased, but you still know that they have a worldview that is in their best interest to share. That makes it completely different.

espeed 12y ago
Except that in every one of those examples, you know you're being fed a worldview slanted by the author Not always. A perceptive person will know they're being bombarded with messages 24 hours a day, there's persuasion going on, and they may pick up on some of the more overt techniques; however, they won't always know the mechanisms at work or the entities behind the messages. For example, big PR firms often work behind the scenes to set the stage for large conglomerates. Unless you are actively engaged in trying to connect and analyze the message space, you won't see how a coordinated campaign's mosaic of messages coalesce over time and space. You won't be privy to all the facets of the push and pull in play. You might detect things like frame boundaries, but you won't always know what's omitted. And some things are only evident in hindsight. Only the most active and astute observers will be aware of the extent of it, and most people won't see any of it because they don't have the mental model for it.