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A STUDY DETAILING how Facebook secretly manipulated the news feed of some 700,000 users to study “emotional contagion” has prompted anger on social media.
For one week in 2012 Facebook tampered with the algorithm used to place posts into user news feeds to study how this affected their mood.
The study, conducted by researchers affiliated with Facebook, Cornell University, and the University of California at San Francisco, appeared in the June 17 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers wanted to see if the number of positive, or negative, words in messages they read affected whether users then posted positive or negative content in their status updates.
Indeed, after the exposure the manipulated users began to use negative or positive words in their updates depending on what they were exposed to.
“Emotional contagion”
“Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness,” the study authors wrote.
“These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.”
While other studies have used metadata to study trends, this appears to be unique because it manipulates the data to see if there is a reaction.
Ethical?
The study was legal according to Facebook’s rules — but was it ethical?
Susan Fiske, a Princeton University professor who edited the report for publication, told The Atlantic that she was concerned about the research and contacted the authors.
They in turn said that their institutional review boards approved the research “on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people’s News Feeds all the time”.
Fiske admitted to being “a little creeped out” by the study.
Facebook told The Atlantic that they “carefully consider” their research, and have “a strong internal review process”.
Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, says it has more than one billion active users.
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This just in, people are basically sheep and can be manipulated very easily.
Let me guess… You consider yourself above it all?
‘Mainstream media’ works the same way. It distorts headlines & manipulates people. It often plays on peoples emotions rather than their intellect.
We often read newspapers or online news sites, and taking what we read there as ‘fact’. Most newspapers are far from neutral. We are really reading, is the agendas and opinion of the editorial board, of the news site.
Everything is carefully spun to appear as ‘neutral’.
T.I.M., Install adblock and ghostery and you will be above it it all because you won’t see any of the crap Facebook tries to feed you about “OMG this woman is hated by the beauty industry” and trying to sign you up to Farmville.
The faster people get over their obsession with social media the faster we will grow as a society.
#like
I bet this only works on women.
#sexistbuttrue
Richard – Humans are social by nature. Social media will remain.
“Social” media ironically is anything but social. That’s the problem. It’s a platform for advertising and information gathering.
Social media is social in the context of Internet usage.
Not in the context of human interaction which is what Facebook would have you believe.
I was in a good mood before I read this article!
u ok hun txt me xx don’t mind de begrudgers deyll get what’s cummin’ to dem.
Stopped using Facebook years ago!
Ditto. A very large waste of power, racks, cooling, cabling and servers in my opinion. Not to mention brain power.
“Not having a Facebook account” is the new “I don’t own a TV.”
I don’t think you can compare tv to Facebook.
I wasn’t comparing the two. I was comparing the two statements.
You were comparing by implication.
No I wasn’t.
Yes you were.
No he weren’t.
Yes I wasn’t?
Anyone know what the next big social site will be?
If I knew, I wouldn’t be sharing it!
Pornbook
No different than staggering articles with dubious statistical information over time to sway opinion.
The property prices articles in the journal?
Facebook is the single most destructive force to productivity in the history of mankind. It should be destroyed.
This is a game changer. One-seventh of the world’s population is in the hands of these deviants.
I’ve noticed for some time that the App Sky news has also been ‘introducing’ foreign bits for a while now. They have invariably been from the US and Pakistan. And they have always been about some violent outrage which smacks of the same thing as Facebook.
But Facebook is a very big and frightening machine that can and by the looks of things will be used against us.
Like voting. Protest and survive!
have your say