FACEBOOK isnt just a platform for catching up on what your friends are doing. It is also a research set-up where every user, unbeknown to him or her, may potentially be a test subject. A Facebook worker recently published a study in a top journal, Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences (PNAS). His co-authors are two Cornell dons. The study was an experiment to alter the mood of Facebook users, which upset some people as no one was explicitly asked for their consent. The fear was that vulnerable populations such as the depressed or the young (kids aged 13 and above can have Facebook accounts) may have been included. The experiment on 689,003 users was conducted for a week in January 2012. Facebook tweaked its news feeds to highlight happy posts and stories (for one group) versus unhappy ones (for another group). It found that feeding users happy posts inspired them to post happy ones themselves. Conversely, feeding them unhappy posts led them to make unhappy ones themselves. So user moods were contagious online, Facebook concluded.
Posted on: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 09:38:11 +0000
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