Above: The Ludovico Technique is performed on Alex in Stanley Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange.'
It reminds me of those tests the U.S. did on unknowing citizens in the MKUltra program in the 1950s. You know, when they dosed strippers and soldiers with acid without telling them.
Unbelievable as it might seem, Facebook injected negative content into the feeds of unknowing Facebook users to see if it would make the posts written by said Facebookers more negative.
The researchers believe that it did. The mood of the posts in user’s feeds moved like a “contagion” (the researchers’ word, not mine) from the news feed into the brain of the Facebooker.
The inverse, too, was true, the researchers say.
Facebook actually messed with the moods of its users, who — allow me to remind you — are Facebook’s bread and butter. Exposing users to brand advertisements is the social media giant’s only real business.
So it’s surprising that Facebook would conduct such experiments, and even more surprising that it would be dumb enough to publish the results.
The report containing the results of the experiment was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“When positive expressions were reduced,” the paper states, “people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.”
But even the PNAS has doubts about the validity of the research outcome. There is doubt whether the negative and positive emotions caused by the manipulation of the news feed was really caused only by the news feed content, and not by negative interactions with other users.
The research was led by Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer. Here’s what it says at Kramer’s American Psychological Association page: “D.I. Kramer, PhD, has an enviable subject pool: the world’s roughly 500 million [now well more than a billion] Facebook users.”
The other researchers were Cornell University professor Jeff Hancock, and UCSF post-doctoral fellow Jamie Guillory.
The report says that users provided tacit consent to be used in research studies when they signed up for Facebook and agreed to Facebook’s Data Use Policy.
So no legal exposure for Facebook, but definitely some more bad vibes from a company that has demonstrated over and over its disregard for the privacy of users. This experiment goes even further. It’s one thing to use the private data of a user for advertising purposes, which can only result in an intrusive ad or two, but it’s quite another to actively harm the wellbeing of users.
Facebook already has plenty of ways to make people unhappy, from its humblebrags to its envy-inducing profiles. Last year a University of Michigan study told us that Facebook makes many young people depressed. Another study, published by Berlin’s Humboldt University, reported that Facebook often fills users with feelings of envy.
And what is the point of this research? Why is it being conducted? Is it purely an academic exercise, or could it be used by some unscrupulous party to mess with people’s feeds and moods on a regular basis?
(Big) hat tip: Pando Daily’s David Holmes
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Facebook secretly experimented with the moods of 700,000 of its users
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