Thought experiment: could facebook rig an election by initiating a feedback loop, only promoting statuses that support their candidate while suppressing those in opposition? Answer: yes. For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700,000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 13:04:14 +0000
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