Denial ain’t a river
2014
Facebook Tinkers With Users’ Emotions in News Feed Experiment, Stirring Outcry
By Vindu Goel
June 29, 2014
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html
Facebook apologises for psychological experiments on users
This article is more than 4 years old
The second most powerful executive at the company, Sheryl Sandberg, says experiments were ‘poorly communicated’
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-apologises-psychological-experiments-on-users
Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users’ Emotions For Science
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-689003-users-emotions-for-science/#d85b840197c5
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 instead — 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 2010 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 The New Scientist and 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 “disturbed.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/
Everything We Know About Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment
It was probably legal. But was it ethical?
Facebook emotion experiment sparks criticism
30 June 2014
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28051930
ROBINSON MEYER
Facebook’s Mood Manipulation Experiment Might Have Been Illegal
Two University of Maryland law professors allege that the social network’s experiments—and OkCupid’s—count as “research,” and thus violate state statute.
ROBINSON MEYER
SEP 24, 2014
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/facebooks-mood-manipulation-experiment-might-be-illegal/380717/
JUN 28, 2014
It didn’t work on me.
It also hasn’t worked on several others that I know.
We are into rescuing dogs. We don’t really care about much else.