You might find this article of interest if you use Facebook. Another reason to dislike Facebook. Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users Emotions For Science forbes/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-689003-users-emotions-for-science/ Quote: Facebook is the best human research lab ever. There’s no need to get experiment participants to sign pesky consent forms as they’ve already agreed to the site’s data use policy. A team of Facebook data scientists are constantly coming up with new ways to study human behavior through the social network. When the team releases papers about what it’s learned from us, we often learn surprising things about Facebook — such as the fact that it can keep track of the status updates we never actually post. Facebook has played around with manipulating people before — getting 60,000 to rock the vote in 2012 that theoretically wouldn’t have otherwise — but a recent study shows Facebook playing a whole new level of mind gamery with its guinea pigs users. As first noted by Animal New York, Facebook’s data scientists manipulated the News Feeds of 689,003 users, removing either all of the positive posts or all of the negative posts to see how it affected their moods. If there was a week in January 2012 where you were only seeing photos of dead dogs or incredibly cute babies, you may have been part of the study. Now that the experiment is public, people’s mood about the study itself would best be described as “negative.” ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ So is it okay for Facebook to play mind games with us for science? It’s a cool finding but manipulating unknowing users’ emotional states to get there puts Facebook’s big toe across that creepy line. When universities conduct studies like this, they have to run them by an ethics board first to get approval — ethics boards that were created because scientists were getting too creepy in their experiments, getting subjects to think they were shocking someone to death in order to study obedience and letting men live with syphilis for study purposes. A 2012 profile of the Facebook data team noted, “ Unlike academic social scientists, Facebook’s employees have a short path from an idea to an experiment on hundreds of millions of people.” (I’ve reached out to Facebook to find out what the review process was here. Via @ZLeeily, the PNAS editor on the article says this study did pass muster with an Institutional Review Board, but we’ll see if it passes muster with users. Ideally, Facebook would have a consent process for willing study participants: a box to check somewhere saying you’re okay with participating in the occasional random psychological experiment for science. Board member Bette has just had someone apparently create another account looking just like hers and using the same images on its front page. I received a friend request from this user and thought nothing of it, but should have as Bette is already a close friend on Facebook. Clearly there were two users on Facebook using the name of Bette ~ ~, but now when I search, there shows up only one now. Is Facebook doing more manipulation? Just another reason to dislike Facebook as I do. Obviously if they choose to do so, the Facebook organization can be very manipulative of your interactions there. Things may not be what they seem. It might just be Big Brother yanking on your chain. Ted Report this post
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 19:40:38 +0000
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