Facebook conducted a massive psychological experiment on 689,003 users, manipulating their news feeds to assess the effects on their emotions. The details of the experiment were published in an article entitled “Experimental Evidence Of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks” published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The short version is, Facebook has the ability to make you feel good or bad, just by tweaking what shows up in your news feed. Facebook’s Data Use Policy permits the company to conduct experiments on users by relying on the term “research” in the Data Use Policy. The study has troubling implications for Facebook’s ability to manipulate the user experience for a variety of ends suggesting that what a user agrees to in the Data Use Policy is critically important. The authors were able to conduct the research because in their words, automated testing “was consistent with Facebook’s Data Use Policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research.” How did Facebook manipulate news feeds to create emotional contagion? They relied on an automated system that identified positive or negative words based on an electronic dictionary. They then reduced the positive content in some users news feeds, finding that when the positive content was reduced, a larger percentage of words in people’s status updates were negative and a smaller percentage were positive. When negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. The authors found, “[t]hese results suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks and providing support for previously contested claims that emotions spread via contagion through a network.” forbes/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-user-news-feeds-to-create-emotional-contagion/
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 05:51:02 +0000
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