Facebook Reveals Secret Experiment To Control Your Emotions

A new study of emotional contagion which manipulated the Facebook news

feeds of 689,003 users for a week in 2012 has been widely criticised over ethical
and privacy concerns.
Facebook users who took part in the experiment did not give their consent,
either before or after their news feeds were manipulated.
In fact, you may have taken part without knowing anything about it.
News feed manipulation
Working with researchers at Cornell University and the University of California,
San Francisco, Facebook subtly adjusted the types of stories that appeared in
users news feeds for that week (Kramer et al., 2014).
Some people saw stories that were slightly more emotionally negative, while
others saw more content that was slightly more emotionally positive.
People were then tracked to see what kind of status updates they posted
subsequently.
One of the studys authors, Jeff Hancock, explained the results:
People who had positive content experimentally reduced on their Facebook
news feed, for one week, used more negative words in their status updates.
When news feed negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred:
Significantly more positive words were used in peoples status updates.
In other words: positive and negative emotions are contagious online.
The study echoes that conducted recently by Coviello et al. (2014), which found
that positive emotions are more contagious than negative.
The previous study, though, while it was conducted on Facebook in a somewhat
similar way, did not manipulate users news feeds, rather it used random
weather variations to make a natural experiment:
they needed something random which would affect peoples emotions as a
group and could be tracked in their status updates this would create a kind of
experiment.
They hit upon the idea of using rain, which reliably made peoples status updates
slightly more negative. (Happiness is Contagious and Powerful on Social Media)
Was it right?
There are all sorts of conversations going on about whether or not this
experiment was sound.
Media outlets have been scrambling around to see what various rules have to
say about this.
Was the studys ethical procedure correctly reviewed? Did Facebook break its
terms of service?
But lets just forget the rules for a moment and use our brains:
Was this study likely to do anyone any harm? Highly unlikely. Psychologists measure
the influence of manipulations using an effect size. In this study it was d = 0.001.
Trust me, this is beyond miniscule.
Should users have been told theyd taken part in an experiment afterwards? Yes, it
would have been a nice courtesy and most people would probably have been fine
with it.
Big data
The reason people are jumping on the story is because of concerns about what
other people are doing with our data, especially big corporations and
governments.
Take Facebook itself: many people dont realise that Facebook is already
manipulating your news feed.
The average Facebook news feed has 1,500 items vying for a spot in front of
your eyeballs.
Facebook doesnt show you everything, so it has to decide what stays and what
goes.
To do this they use an algorithm which is manipulating your news feed in ways
that are much less transparent than this experiment.
Professor Susan Fiske of Princeton University, who edited the article for the
academic journal it was published in (PNAS), told The Atlantic:
I was concerned until I queried the authors and they said their local institutional
review board had approved itand apparently on the grounds that Facebook
apparently manipulates peoples News Feeds all the time I understand why
people have concerns. I think their beef is with Facebook, really, not the
research.
But should our justifiable concerns about being spied on, manipulated and
exploited stop researchers conducting a harmless and valuable psychology
experiment?
Final word goes to the studys lead author, Adam Kramer, a Data Scientist at
Facebook, who was moved to apologise:
The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact
of Facebook and the people that use our product.
We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing
friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out.
At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends negativity might
lead people to avoid visiting Facebook.
We didnt clearly state our motivations in the paper.