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.
Jim Sheridan, a member of the Commons
media select committee, said the
experiment was intrusive. "This is
extraordinarily powerful stuff and if
there is not already legislation on this,
then there should be to protect people,"
he said. "They are manipulating material
from people's personal lives and I am
worried about the ability of Facebook
and others to manipulate people's
thoughts in politics or other areas. If
people are being thought-controlled in
this kind of way there needs to be
protection and they at least need to
know about it."
A Facebook spokeswoman said the
research, published this month in the
journal of the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences in the US,
was carried out "to improve our
services and to make the content
people see on Facebook as relevant and
engaging as possible".
She said: "A big part of this is
understanding how people respond to
different types of content, whether it's
positive or negative in tone, news from
friends, or information from pages they
follow."
But other commentators voiced fears
that the process could be used for
political purposes in the runup to
elections or to encourage people to
stay on the site by feeding them happy
thoughts and so boosting advertising
revenues.
In a series of Twitter posts, Clay
Johnson, the co-founder of Blue State
Digital, the firm that built and managed
Barack Obama's online campaign for the
presidency in 2008, said: " The Facebook
'transmission of anger' experiment is
terrifying
."
He asked: "Could the CIA incite
revolution in Sudan by pressuring
Facebook to promote discontent?
Should that be legal? Could Mark
Zuckerberg swing an election by
promoting Upworthy [a website
aggregating viral content] posts two
weeks beforehand? Should that be
legal?"
It was claimed that Facebook may have
breached ethical and legal guidelines by
not informing its users they were being
manipulated in the experiment, which
was carried out in 2012.
The study said altering the news feeds
was "consistent with Facebook's data
use policy, to which all users agree prior
to creating an account on Facebook,
constituting informed consent for this
research".
But Susan Fiske, the Princeton
academic who edited the study, said she
was concerned. "People are supposed
to be told they are going to be
participants in research and then agree
to it and have the option not to agree to
it without penalty."
James Grimmelmann, professor of law
at Maryland University, said Facebook
had failed to gain "informed consent" as
defined by the US federal policy for the
protection of human subjects, which
demands explanation of the purposes of
the research and the expected duration
of the subject's participation, a
description of any reasonably
foreseeable risks and a statement that
participation is voluntary. "This study is
a scandal because it brought Facebook's
troubling practices into a realm –
academia – where we still have
standards of treating people with
dignity and serving the common good,"
he said on his blog.
It is not new for internet firms to use
algorithms to select content to show to
users and Jacob Silverman, author of
Terms of Service: Social Media,
Surveillance, and the Price of Constant
Connection, told Wire magazine on
Sunday the internet was already "a vast
collection of market research studies;
we're the subjects".
"What's disturbing about how Facebook
went about this, though, is that they
essentially manipulated the sentiments
of hundreds of thousands of users
without asking permission," he said.
"Facebook cares most about two things:
engagement and advertising. If
Facebook, say, decides that filtering out
negative posts helps keep people happy
and clicking, there's little reason to
think that they won't do just that. As
long as the platform remains such an
important gatekeeper – and their
algorithms utterly opaque – we should
be wary about the amount of power and
trust we delegate to it."
Robert Blackie, director of digital at
Ogilvy One marketing agency, said the
way internet companies filtered
information they showed users was
fundamental to their business models,
which made them reluctant to be open
about it.
"To guarantee continued public
acceptance they will have to discuss
this more openly in the future," he said.
"There will have to be either
independent reviewers of what they do
or government regulation. If they don't
get the value exchange right then
people will be reluctant to use their
services, which is potentially a big
business problem."
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