In 2012, Facebook Altered Content To Tweak Readers' Emotions 130
The Atlantic reports that two years ago, Facebook briefly conducted an experiment on a subset of its users, altering the mix of content shown to them to emphasize content sorted by tone, negative or positive, and observe the results. From the Atlantic article: For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700,000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves.
This tinkering was just revealed as part of a new study, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many previous studies have used Facebook data to examine “emotional contagion,” as this one did. This study is different because, while other studies have observed Facebook user data, this one set out to manipulate it.
At least they showed their work.
Re:consent (Score:4, Informative)
From a legal standpoint, for an activity to be considered "research", it must be "designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge". http://www.virginia.edu/vpr/ir... [virginia.edu]
When a website uses A/B testing to improve its own internal operations, it's seeking to privately develop limited knowledge on its own operations, rather than general knowledge. This puts it outside the scope of US federal regulations on research, which have been narrowly crafted to avoid regulating commercial activities like these.
Given these criteria, Facebook was surely engaged in research.
Re:consent (Score:5, Informative)
Yes there is laws against this. Anyone who lives in Canada, and is a part of the experiment but did not receive informed consent may contact Health Canada/federal crown about it. It's illegal here. [hc-sc.gc.ca]
Re:Army funded (Score:3, Informative)
Correction: An earlier version of this story reported that the study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office. In fact, the study received no external funding.