Facebook Publishes ‘Disturbing’ Mind-Control Experiment

Facebook met with a storm of controversy over the weekend after it revealed it had carried out a psychology experiment on hundreds of thousands of users without their knowledge or consent, something branded “disturbing” by some.

The week-long study, carried out in 2012 on more than 689,000 users, investigated the ways in which manipulating the “news feed” seen by a user affected their mood. The study found that users posted more positive comments if they were exposed to positive data, and vice-versa, a phenomenon the study termed emotional “contagion”.

Emotional ‘contagion’

“These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks,” the researchers said in the study. “Given the massive scale of social networks such as Facebook, even small effects can have large aggregated consequences.”

The study, carried out by a member of Facebook’s data science team with researchers at the University of California in San Francisco and Cornell University, was published earlier this year in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US.

A report on the research in the magazine New Scientist spurred a broad reaction from politicians, academics and lawyers over this weekend, with many focusing on the fact that Facebook had not obtained consent from the experiment’s subjects after the manner normally employed in academic research. The study said the experiment was carried out within the terms of Facebook’s data use policy, to which users agree when creating an account on the site, thus “constituting informed consent for this research”.

The project detailed in the study was only one of many that the company carries out in order to fine-tune its content-delivery algorithm, Facebook added in a statement. It said such research involves “no unnecessary collection of people’s data”, and said such experiments are designed to “improve our services and to make the content people see on Facebook as relevant and engaging as possible… We carefully consider what research we do and have a strong internal review process.”

‘Disturbing’

Susan Fiske, a Princeton professor who edited the study for publication, told The Atlantic magazine that the research was “disturbing” and said she had ethical concerns. “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,” she told The Guardian.

James Grimmelmann, a professor of law at Maryland University, said Facebook’s definition of “informed consent” did not match that laid down by US federal policy for the protection of human subjects.

“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 in a blog post.

Jim Sheridan, a member of the Commons media select committee, called on Sunday evening for a parliamentary investigation into the issue. “This is extraordinarily powerful stuff and if there is not already legislation on this, then there should be to protect people,” he told The Guardian.

Others defended Facebook’s practices as standard in the media industry. Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley investor who is on Facebook’s board of directors, said on Twitter that the social network was “designed to lead to positive posts and interactions”.

“Whenever you watch TV, read a book, open a newspaper, or talk to another person, someone’s manipulating your emotions,” he posted.

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