BIG BROTHER INC. FACEBOOK’S STUDY on emotional contagion may not have broken laws, but it has exposed the unfettered power of big data companies grounded in opaque user policies. For one week in 2012, researchers from Facebook, Cornell and the University of California skewed the emotional content of almost 700,000 news feeds to test how users would react. They found that people would write slightly more negative posts when exposed to negative feeds and vice versa. News of the study spread on the Internet on Monday, angering users who thought Facebook had treated them as “lab rats” and sparking European legal probes. Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg eventually apologized for “poorly” communicating the study, but Facebook stood firm. “When someone signs up for Facebook, we’ve always asked permission to use their information,” the company said in a statement. “To suggest we conducted any corporate research without permission is complete fiction.” washingtonpost/opinions/facebooks-study-crosses-an-ethical-line/2014/07/02/61ff3502-0130-11e4-8572-4b1b969b6322_story.html
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 01:35:13 +0000
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