Facebook Admits Manipulating the Emotions of Over a Half-Million Users in 'Experiment'

It already knows whether you are single or dating, the first school you went to and whether you like or loathe Justin Bieber. But now Facebook, the world's biggest social networking site, is facing a storm of protest after it revealed it had discovered how to make users feel happier or sadder with a few computer key strokes.

It has published details of a vast experiment in which it manipulated information posted on 689,000 users' home pages and found it could make people feel more positive or negative through a process of "emotional contagion".

In a study with academics from Cornell and the University of California, Facebook filtered users' news feeds – the flow of comments, videos, pictures and web links posted by other people in their social network. One test reduced users' exposure to their friends' "positive emotional content", resulting in fewer positive posts of their own. Another test reduced exposure to "negative emotional content" and the opposite happened.

The study concluded: "Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks."

Lawyers, internet activists and politicians said this weekend that the mass experiment in emotional manipulation was "scandalous", "spooky" and "disturbing".

On Sunday evening, a senior British MP called for a parliamentary investigation into how Facebook and other social networks manipulated emotional and psychological responses of users by editing information supplied to them.

eddie wrote:Can you simplify for me?
I'm not getting it.

Ben_Reilly wrote:

eddie wrote:Can you simplify for me?
I'm not getting it.

Sure, they basically messed with people's newsfeeds to expose some of them to a higher dose of negative posts/lower dose of positive posts, and vice-versa.

They found that the people exposed to more negativity in turn made more negative posts, and people exposed to more positivity made more positive posts, suggesting their mood was affected by the tampering.

eddie wrote:

Ben_Reilly wrote:

eddie wrote:Can you simplify for me?
I'm not getting it.

Sure, they basically messed with people's newsfeeds to expose some of them to a higher dose of negative posts/lower dose of positive posts, and vice-versa.

They found that the people exposed to more negativity in turn made more negative posts, and people exposed to more positivity made more positive posts, suggesting their mood was affected by the tampering.

Ok, thanks. I though that's what you meant but wanted to be sure before I said: WTF????

How,wrong is that? Do they know now many people,they could possibly have pushed over the edge with a stunt like that???
It's immoral and it's very dangerous IMO.

eddie wrote:

Ben_Reilly wrote:

Sure, they basically messed with people's newsfeeds to expose some of them to a higher dose of negative posts/lower dose of positive posts, and vice-versa.

They found that the people exposed to more negativity in turn made more negative posts, and people exposed to more positivity made more positive posts, suggesting their mood was affected by the tampering.

Ok, thanks. I though that's what you meant but wanted to be sure before I said: WTF????

How,wrong is that? Do they know now many people,they could possibly have pushed over the edge with a stunt like that???
It's immoral and it's very dangerous IMO.

eddie wrote:No sass, that's not how I understood it?
They wasn't changing people's post they were filtering only the one they wanted the particular user to see.

For example, if they were using me as the experiment, they may only have shown yours and Ben's negative posts and not the three positive ones made  by my other three friends?

eddie wrote:No sass, that's not how I understood it?
They wasn't changing people's post they were filtering only the one they wanted the particular user to see.

For example, if they were using me as the experiment, they may only have shown yours and Ben's negative posts and not the three positive ones made  by my other three friends?

Ben_Reilly wrote:

eddie wrote:No sass, that's not how I understood it?
They wasn't changing people's post they were filtering only the one they wanted the particular user to see.

For example, if they were using me as the experiment, they may only have shown yours and Ben's negative posts and not the three positive ones made  by my other three friends?

Yo why I gotta be the negative one?

Ben_Reilly wrote:Your animosity appears to be inappropriately directed at the contestant, rather than at the contest itself.