Facebook routinely adjusts its users’ news feeds — testing out the number of ads they see or the size of photos that appear — often without their knowledge. It is all for the purpose, the company says, of creating a more alluring and useful product.But last week, Facebook revealed that it had manipulated the news feeds of over half a million randomly selected users to change the number of positive and negative posts they saw. It was part of a psychological study to examine how emotions can be spread on social media.
www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.htmlAlso see:Facebook reveals news feed experiment to control emotions
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”.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feedsFacebook under fire over ‘creepy’ study on users’ emotions [AFP]
Facebook secretly manipulated the feelings of 700,000 users to understand “emotional contagion” in a study that has prompted anger and forced the social network giant on the defensive.For one week in 2012, Facebook tampered with the algorithm used to place posts into users’ news feeds to study how this affected their mood, all without their explicit consent or knowledge.
www.theaustralian.com.au/technology/facebook-under-fire-over-creepy-study-on-users-emotions/story-e6frgakx-1226971718517Should Facebook have experimented on 689,000 users and tried to make them sad?
In a move that has as many people puzzled as outraged, Facebook has published research that involved a deliberate attempt to manipulate the emotional state of 689,000 of its users. Experimenters from Facebook, Cornell University and the University of California, San Francisco conducted experiments over a week period in January 2012 in which they manipulated the contents of users’ News Feeds, screening out posts that had emotional content. The results of the study have recently been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.In the experiment, users were split into three groups and posts which contained either positive or negative words were screened from the users’ news feed. One of the groups acted as a control and had random posts screened from their feeds. They then counted the percentage of emotion words that the test subjects used in their own posts.
theconversation.com/should-facebook-have-experimented-on-689-000-users-and-tried-to-make-them-sad-28485Facebook admits manipulating 689,003 users’ emotions in psychology experiment
A new research paper has revealed two startling pieces of information. First, it disclosed that Facebook manipulated the News Feeds of nearly 700,000 English-speaking users in a research study on emotional states. Second, the study (found in PNAS) suggests that emotional contagion can happen without “direct interaction between people.”The study is based on the idea that “emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness,” according to the abstract. (The abstract also states that the results of studies on this phenomena are controversial.)
www.salon.com/2014/06/29/facebook_admits_it_manipulated_689003_users_emotions_in_psychology_experiment/
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