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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFacebook Ran A Huge Psychological Experiment On Users
Facebook's data scientists conducted a massive experiment where it messed with people's feeds and proved that longer-lasting moods, like happiness or depression, can be transferred across the social network.
The company tweaked the Newsfeed algorithms of689,003 unwitting Facebook users, so that people were seeing an abnormally low number of either positive or negative posts.
In a recently published study, the scientists say they found that when people saw fewer positive posts on their feeds, they produced fewer positive posts and instead wrote more negative posts. On the flip side, when scientists reduced the number of negative posts on a person's newsfeed, those individuals became more positive themselves.
"Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness,"
More at link. http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-study-emotional-states-transfer-2014-6
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Facebook Ran A Huge Psychological Experiment On Users (Original Post)
littlemissmartypants
Jun 2014
OP
Is it not illegal to conduct experiments on people without their consent? nt
Fridays Child
Jun 2014
#5
TeeYiYi
(8,028 posts)1. Creepy. ..nt
TYY
shanti
(21,675 posts)2. clearly, leaving facebook was a wise decision. n/t
Skittles
(153,182 posts)3. pitiful
madaboutharry
(40,218 posts)4. That is really disgraceful.
Fridays Child
(23,998 posts)5. Is it not illegal to conduct experiments on people without their consent? nt
laundry_queen
(8,646 posts)6. They hid the 'consent'
in a bunch of babble in their data use terms or whatever. I hope someone challenges this in court.
Happyhippychick
(8,379 posts)8. At the very least it is unethical
Jeff In Milwaukee
(13,992 posts)9. Interesting issue...
Typically this kind of data could be gathered and used by Facebook for its own purposes (i.e., marketing or customer service) but if they want to publish in any sort of scientific journal, there are more compliance hoops to jump through.
littlemissmartypants
(22,739 posts)7. Please forgive duplicate. More at this post...
Shankapotomus
(4,840 posts)10. Well
Fuck facebook then
Somebody could have committed suicide.
littlemissmartypants
(22,739 posts)11. Indeed.
Third post here on same topic...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=5165663