Facebook secretly manipulated moods of 700,000 users in huge creepy psychology experiment
Get link
Facebook
X
Pinterest
Email
Other Apps
Users freaked out as the social network revealed they'd been messing with their news feeds to try and affect their emotional state
Creepy: The social network left users feeling upset that they'd been experimented on
Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users were stunned to learn the social network had been manipulating their emotional state without their knowledge as part of a massive secret psychological experiment.
Scientists working for the social network made users into lab rats for a week in January 2012, to see if meddling with the posts they saw when they logged in would change their emotions.
The study found that by messing with the news feeds of 689,003 users, researchers could change the kind of status updates they'd make.
If they were shown more negative posts from friends, the users would make more negative status posts, and the other way around.
The research paper, released in the PNAS journal this week, reads: "emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness."
It's not a huge change - just one-tenth of a percent difference - but that could mean hundreds of thousands of status updates a day.
Facebook's terms and conditions, which all users agree to, allow them to carry out research of this kind without telling users they're being experimented on.
The paper says the automated testing: "“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.”
The researchers say they weren't able to see individual users posts at any time, and the positive and negative posts were selected automatically.
In a statement, the social network defended the research.
"This research was conducted for a single week in 2012 and none of the data used was associated with a specific person's Facebook account," they said.
"We do research to improve our services and to make the content people see on Facebook as relevant and engaging as possible. 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. We carefully consider what research we do and have a strong internal review process."
The remains of the female politicians, who died in a ghastly auto accident have been laid to rest at the Bayelsa State cemetery, Azikoro in Yenagoa, the state capital. President Goodluck Jonathan his wife, Dame Patience and the Bayelsa State Governor, Hon. Seriake Dickson as well as wives of the Anambra and Ekiti State Governors joined other sympathizers at a special memorial service in honour of the deceased women at the Dr. Gabriel Okara Cultural Centre, in Yenagoa.
A relative of one of the rescued Chibok girls, Peter Joseph has said that the Federal Government has barred the girls from sharing their experience under Boko Haram captivity with their parents. Joseph said this on Al Jazeera’s programme, “The Stream”.
An American volunteer cardiologist was shot dead in Pakistan on Monday, a member of his minority Ahmadi community said, in the latest attack on a group that says it is Muslim but whose religion is rejected by the state. Mehdi Ali Qamar had taken his wife, young son and a cousin to a graveyard in Punjab province at dawn to pray when he was shot, said Salim ud Din, a spokesperson for the Ahmadi community. "He came here just one or two days ago to work at our heart hospital, to serve humanity and for his country," Din said. "Two persons came on motorbikes. They shot 11 bullets in him." Qamar was born in Pakistan but moved abroad in 1996. He had returned to do voluntary work at a state-of-the-art heart hospital built by the Ahmadi community in the eastern town of Rabwah. Qamar, aged 50, moved to Columbus, Ohio, in the United States, where he founded an Ahmadi centre and raised funds for medical charities in Pakistan, Din said. He is survived by a wife and three young...
Comments
Post a Comment