Facebook=creepy study

[Sangersteve]

One more reason not to Facebook, trying to manipulate the thought process.

Catching a glimpse of the puppet masters who play with the data trails we leave online is always disorienting. And yet there's something new-level creepy about a recent study that shows Facebook manipulated what users saw when they logged into the site as a way to study how it would affect their moods.

But why? Psychologists do all kinds of mood research and behavior studies. What made this study, which quickly stirred outrage, feel so wrong?

Even Susan Fiske, the professor of psychology at Princeton University who edited the study for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of America, had doubts when the research first crossed her desk.

"I was concerned," she told me in a phone interview, "until I queried the authors and they said their local institutional review board had approved it—and apparently on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people's News Feeds all the time... I understand why people have concerns. I think their beef is with Facebook, really, not the research."


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[BigTex]

So can with eff with them by replying to the ads that appear on the news feed?

[Bob Of Burleson]

Facebook responds to criticism
of its experiment on users

By Gail Sullivan
The Washington Post

Facebook is unapologetic about the “emotional contagion” experiment it was conducting on customers.

Reports about the ethics of it (see The Atlantic) have been kicking up emotion and it was getting contagious.

Here’s what happened. For a research project and ultimately a paper, researchers at Facebook tweaked what hundreds of thousans of users saw in their news feeds, skewing the content to be more positive or negative than normal. Then they checked users’ status updates to see if the content affected what they wrote. They found that, yes, Facebook users’ moods are affected by what they see in their news feeds. Users who saw more negative posts would write more negative things on their own walls, and likewise for positive posts.

Facebook did not tell users they were being experimented on, or, as the New York Times put it, were being used as “lab rats.”

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