Facebook is the best human research lab ever. There’s no need to get
experiment participants to sign pesky consent forms as they’ve already
agreed to the site’s data use policy.
A team of Facebook data scientists are
constantly coming up with new ways to study human behavior through the
social network. When the team releases papers about what it’s learned
from us, we often learn surprising things about Facebook instead — such
as the fact that it can keep track of the status updates we never actually post. Facebook has played around with manipulating people before — getting 60,000 to rock the vote in 2010
that theoretically wouldn’t have otherwise — but a recent study shows
Facebook playing a whole new level of mind gamery with its
guinea pigs users. As first noted by The New Scientist and Animal New York,
Facebook’s data scientists manipulated the News Feeds of 689,003 users,
removing either all of the positive posts or all of the negative posts
to see how it affected their moods. If there was a week in January 2012
where you were only seeing photos of dead dogs or incredibly cute
babies, you may have been part of the study. Now that the experiment is
public, people’s mood about the study itself would best be described as
“disturbed.”
The researchers, led by data scientist Adam Kramer,
found that emotions were contagious. “When positive expressions were
reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts;
when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred,”
according to the paper
published by the Facebook research team in the PNAS. “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 experiment ran for a week — January 11–18, 2012 —
during which the hundreds of thousands of Facebook users unknowingly
participating may have felt either happier or more depressed than usual,
as they saw either more of their friends posting ’15 Photos That
Restore Our Faith In Humanity’ articles or despondent status updates
about losing jobs, getting screwed over by X airline, and already
failing to live up to New Year’s resolutions. “*Probably* nobody was
driven to suicide,” tweeted one professor linking to the study, adding a “#jokingnotjoking” hashtag.
The researchers — who may not have been thinking about the optics of a
“Facebook emotionally manipulates users” study — jauntily note that the
study undermines people who claim that looking at our friends’ good
lives on Facebook makes us feel depressed. “The fact that people were
more emotionally positive in response to positive emotion updates from
their friends stands in contrast to theories that suggest viewing
positive posts by friends on Facebook may somehow affect us negatively,”
they write.
They also note that when they took all of the emotional posts out of a
person’s News Feed, that person became “less expressive,” i.e. wrote
fewer status updates. So prepare to have Facebook curate your feed with
the most emotional of your friends’ posts if they feel you’re not
posting often enough.
So is it okay for Facebook to play mind games with us for science?
It’s a cool finding but manipulating unknowing users’ emotional states
to get there puts Facebook’s big toe on that creepy line. Facebook’s data use policy
— that I’m sure you’ve all read — says Facebookers’ information will
be used “for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data
analysis, testing,
research and service improvement,”
making all users potential experiment subjects. And users know that
Facebook’s mysterious algorithms control what they see in their News
Feed. But it may come as a surprise to users to see those two things
combined like this. When universities conduct studies on people, they
have to run them by an ethics board
first to get approval — ethics boards that were created because
scientists were getting too creepy in their experiments, getting
subjects to think they were shocking someone to death in order to study obedience and letting men live with syphilis for study purposes. A 2012 profile of the Facebook data team noted,
“Unlike academic social scientists, Facebook’s employees have a short
path from an idea to an experiment on hundreds of millions of people.”
(Update 6/30/14): Cornell University released a statement Monday
morning saying its ethics board — which is supposed to approve any
research on human subjects — passed on reviewing the study because the
part involving actual humans was done by Facebook not by the Cornell
researcher involved in the study. Though the academic researchers did
help design the study — as noted when it was published — so this seems a bit disingenuous.
In its initial response to the controversy around the study — a
statement sent to me late Saturday night — Facebook doesn’t seem to
really get what people are upset about, focusing on privacy and data use
rather than the ethics of emotional manipulation and whether Facebook’s
TOS lives up to the definition of “informed consent”
usually required for academic studies like this. “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,” says a Facebook
spokesperson. “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. There is
no unnecessary collection of people’s data in connection with these
research initiatives and all data is stored securely.”
Ideally, Facebook would have a consent process for willing study
participants: a box to check somewhere saying you’re okay with being
subjected to the occasional random psychological experiment that
Facebook’s data team cooks up in the name of science. As opposed to the
commonplace psychological manipulation cooked up by advertisers trying
to sell you stuff.
