Facebook Experiment Manipulated 690K User Accounts To Control Emotions

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I'm not sure how we missed this one yesterday. It seems Facebook thought it would be a good idea to manipulate almost 690K accounts for a week as an experiment in controlling emotions.

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".
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Add this to the massive pile of reasons not to use facebook.
 
Television has been doing this for decades and there's no regulations on it. I don't see the big deal.
 
* Well there's plenty of TV regulations, just not on presenting only happy news, or accurate news, or political upheaval news.
 
JimmayLong said:
I would laugh if this is illegal in cailfornia and it doesn't get a lawsuit on it.
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oh quiet your moth. Zuckerberg built Facebook, even though he stole the idea, and is now supreme evil leader. Google may argue that last bit.

:p
 
Going to quote myself from Jan, 2014 http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1802954&page=2

Insula Gilliganis said:
NoAgenda, "the Best Podcast in the Universe" (now twice a week) pointed this out ----> from Time Magazine's Mark Zuckerberg Person of the Year 2010 article

The door opened, and a distinguished-looking gray-haired man burst in — it's the only way to describe his entrance — trailed by a couple of deputies. He was both the oldest person in the room by 20 years and the only one wearing a suit. He was in the building, he explained with the delighted air of a man about to secure ironclad bragging rights forever, and he just had to stop in and introduce himself to Zuckerberg: Robert Mueller, director of the FBI
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Yeah.. always glad to provide sensitive and private personal info about myself to a company that has the Director of the FBI wandering it's hallways.
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Oh the data they must have collected up to this point on human behavior must truly be colossal, with only more collected every second.

Just awesome on a planetary scale never seen before.

One can only try to grasp at the possibilities, weather this is ethical or not seems irrelevant at this point since it already has been happening for years now.
 
I don't see why people are getting upset about this. The mass media has been doing this for decades, purely with political goals in mind.
 
Well, I only use Facebook to check up on family photos after events so I never noticed.
I suppose when you check 2x a week tops it'd be easy to miss.
 
They must have hit me with the apathy one, because I really couldn't care any less about what most people post on Facebook. I'm just in it for when my funny friends are funny or to show people how cute my kid is when he does something cute.
 
pgwalsh said:
oh quiet your moth. Zuckerberg built Facebook, even though he stole the idea, and is now supreme evil leader. Google may argue that last bit.

:p
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No one out evils google. My long standing rule is if you have to say it then you're probably not it, still stands. The whole Don't be evil just shows how often google has to remind itself it's very evil and should try better. Just like the democratic republic of congo isn't very democratic/republic, democratic people's republic of korea isn't very democratic/republic like or people's republic of china not much of a republic. TBS "very funny" well it's not...
 
Come one people, the manipulation was only for a week and think of all the valuable insight this study has provided. Without it we would never know that showing people happy news makes them happy, and sad news makes them sad. This is revolutionary.
 
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