Facebook tinkered with users’ feeds for a massive psychology experiment

I wonder if there is a list of names that FB played God with? I would think that if these people committed crimes or behavior because of the FB posts that regardless of the contract... you can not knowingly hurt people or abuse them in this order with a "terms of service agreement"...... If this caused harm to individuals then it is not legal but criminal ....

what is needed a list and profiles of the individuals targeted.......

Facebook? Whats Facebook?

a reply to: trollz

Scientists at Facebook?

This experiment that Facebook pulled on everyone violated the Nuremberg Code that was established at the end of World War II during the War Crimes Trials.

en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: Argyll

You've gotta laugh!....Facebook tells you in no uncertain terms what it will do with your personal details via it's T&C's ....it then goes on to actually publish reports of what it has done with those said details....... and the results!

Yet people still claim they are the devil incarnate!................priceless!

Gosh, I had to wade through two whole pages of paranoia to get to this. Star for you.

The fact that emotional contagion spreads through the media is news? It wasn't to Orson Welles. It wasn't to Dr. Goebbels. The mystery to me is why they had to do a study to find this out.

a reply to: Dianec

as so,ebody without a cell phone I can tell you that it is difficult. I use public phones a lot and I have mastered the ability to ask somebody to use theirs. To go along with the whole paying with checks or cash I used to use my debit card a lot and I have no started withdrawing my money and using cash. I have thought about buying a pre-paid phone just so I have it just in case.

a reply to: Divin3F3nrus

We didn't miss what we didn't have before (cell phone), because no one had it. It's interesting we got by (I'm still here) without any of this stuff yet now we feel we need it just incase. Why is that? A social influence for sure. Our need to be similar? Feeling deprived or unsafe when the majority have things we don't? Has this become a basic need? No - but maybe "ability to instantly connect with another" will be added to Maslow's lower levels down the road. That would be an ugly thing to see in the list of "safety needs".

I think it's awesome you don't have one; that you have gone this long without giving into that. I really need to do a rapid detox with those who expect me to be there at the drop of the hat and separate from mine for a week. It has become a big source of stress. If a person isn't allowing it to become central to their lives (feel naked without it), it can be good for emergencies.

I could easily live without Facebook but it keeps me connected to people I might otherwise lose track of. Even if I posted I wouldn't be concerned about research due to the fact it's wide open to the public, and any research would be observational in nature. As long as it didn't harm me personally (in the present or future), I could care less. What I find annoying is that I look something up and when I log onto the internet the next time I'm getting sales ads for the very thing I googled the day before. For as long as I live I will find that creepy. Cookies.

I'm not sure I would be ok without the internet. I like to learn so use it for that. It makes my life easier as well. While I could "live" without it, it's the last thing technologically speaking I would give up. Let's only hope that our fellow brothers and sisters don't use these modern conveniences to cause harm.

so many brutal comments on facebook, And with new stations posting screwed up stuff to draw in negativity its bait set out.

People are all like Blungeon this guy or kill this guy or blah blah because they did something wrong.

In our society we jail people we don't stone them. Sometimes its ineffective and i honestly believe that our resource management needs to be changed as well as our human desires.

Humanity needs to evolve, Everyone needs to become a scientist, Engineer, and Bio-chemist.
it is the future as humanity gains its collective consiousness on a more physical scale day by day.

If we are to survive as a species we must take care of our technological and cyclical sustainance must be maintained.
Science is working these issues. We are advancing extremely quickly, Other species are taking notice of the abilities of mankind.
Within 270 years we went from candles and horse carrages to steam trains, Electricity, motor engines, Huge contributions from Nichola Tesla... to much of a contribution in fact, then ww 1 with the industrial age, followed by ww2 and the warmachines from both those wars drove technology further, now with rockets, sattellites, computers, lasers and super conductors, robotics, to super computers, Collective storrage of files obtained all over the world, mass survailence, longer range R/C vehicles, medical breakthroughs and biological discoveries with DNA, moving towards creating our own life.

Within a span of 3 centries we went from cheap gunpowder and swords to exploring space with unmanned probs.
Maybe it was Nichola Tesla who sparked all this, Its pretty likely. Makes you wonder if humanity would still be in the dark ages with DC current failing to acomplish ACs task. Without all this, The NSA would be a prophecy written on a scroll in a desert somewhere.

never had a Facebook, never wanted one. Asides from this I think it promotes stupidity, laziness and adultery. It encourages others to pry into others lives, and for others to share information and media that in the past was private and privy to those who you chose to tell. If I wanted to carefully exact revenge on someone in my city it would not be hard to know where they live, where they work, where they go and when they go, their friends and associates, their family and piece together a detailed picture from photos etc. People don't realise just how much they are putting out there for everyone to see not just TPTB. Any lone nutter with an obsession or a grudge, any pervert and any employer, current or potential can delve into the depths of your boring existence without permission.
All this without the mention of the all new cowardly act of cyber bulling that is plaguing our youth, and vulnerable members of society, the pressure on our young people to fit with the "norm" and to be "attractive" and have "friends" is so great thanks to social networking.
Don't get me wrong the initial premise of keeping in touch with people is great, but does it need to be public?
As somebody said earlier in the post, what was wrong with the instant messaging services of old, to interact with people you actually knew?

As over the top as it sounds, you are essentially compiling a personality profile and dossier on yourself.

a reply to: trollz

Its the same thing when you see all those adverts telling you that you should eat this or drink that in order to stay healthy and not die from this or that... they want people to panic so that their blood pressure levels rise in order to bring on stress which in turn raises the blood pressure levels more.... eventually leading to you know what...

In my lifetime its best to stay calm and remain calm in order to live a long life!

Avoid those ads as much as possible and when you do see one, get off the page as asap and go to somewhere which makes you feel happy.

I am so glad that i dont use Facebook, reading stuff like this reminds me of how bad social media is and that i made the right decision ditching it... Although im a massive loner and always the last too know about anything with family & friends because i don't use it and literally everyone i know is on it..

I heard the scientists from "The Jersey Shore" conducted similar experiments.

a reply to: trollz

Good, because all those that use facebook or have an account get what they deserve. If they didn't realize that having an account with a site like facebook could lead to grievous misgivings then they are far dumber than I think they are....and I think they are dumber than a room full of dumb people waiting patiently for their IQ results on a test they never actually took!

Twitter is just as bad if not worse than facebook !

Say the wrong word about a fee paying corporation that pays twitter and you end up taking an IQ test to see how long it takes you to workout that you are tweeting to yourself.

Feel free to include URL in you tweets but if they don't link back to a controled source then be ready for a warning about the site listed in the URL is sending spam or has a virus.

Facebok, Twitter and Google now control "The truth" we think we know and this is a very bad state to be in and none of us can claim not to have been corrupted at one stage or another by this manipultaion of the internet.

That's what you get and deserve to get for having a facebook account.

Some lawyer ought to start a class action civil suit against Facebook for conducting an experiment without informed consent. They admitted to doing it, they think they can get away with it, so they should be held accountable. And yes, they did need informed consent in this case because they were manipulating variables and not just observing natural events. Who cares, it's just my 2 cents.

Only a few years eh?

Not like they've been recording and data-mining since day one. You ever wonder who might just be looking at all of this?
ALL of the wrong people. Advertisers, criminals, politicians, scientists, and especially the government.

What better way to detect a possible civil disturbance than by monitoring social media?

You start posting anti-government things and facebook puts you on a watch list. Simple. Anytime you've liked something, it's recorded and matched against past preferences to build up a psychical and psychological profile. They know who you talk to, what you look at, and where you post from. And if you aren't on facebook or social media, then you're "weird".

This only confirms my theory. If you want to spread the the truth to the masses, you can't do it online.
You need to be in the streets. Give the rebel movement a voice and a leader to stand behind and this wretched age of corrupt, deceit, and wanton disregard for other human beings will come to an end. No more will I stand idly by, like some sheep in a herd thinking he's a wolf. Nay, I need to become a wolf in order to kill the other wolves in sheep's clothing. My ASVAB score and psychical fitness is phenomenal. I only need to quit smoking the green chronic for a few months and then I'm becoming a 12B combat engineer. And then part 51 will begin.

Goodbye for now ATS. You were able to reaffirm my faith in humanity.

Now I shall lurk

I wonder if they did not break some state laws doing this.

I know that in GEORGIA, there was code that we could not do any human psychological experimentation - it might or might not have been specific to mental health patients. I do remember that there was a way to try to gain exception to this law- there was an official way to try to get a study approved.

I ran into it time and time again - for instance, once we wanted to put in some hand rails. Just hand rails, but we only had the budget to do half the unit and we had to wait until we could do the WHOLE unit- because the patients were divided on sides, it could have been seen as doing some sort of research. When we banned smoking on the units, we had to do it as a blanket rule, we weren't allowed to do it unit by unit so we could see the problems - that law was taken SERIOUSLY even on what might seem like trivial things.

How does Facebook KNOW they didn't catch mental health patients from states with laws against such experimentation up in their study?

I think the whole thing is appalling. I would hate to think my son or daughter committed suicide MIGHT have been in that number. Isolated or manipulated via social media with possibly (do we know) NO consideration about the possibly fragile state of the users that were chosen.

This doesn't surprise me a bit. But the fact that they knowingly manipulated users' news feeds for a "study", without their consent, is shady. I'm sure it's buried somewhere in their T&C's though.

I know I am sometimes negatively affected by what people post. I am not ashamed to admit it, either. When someone posts on and on and on about how awesome they are or how awesome their marriage is, I just want to call it what it is: BS.

No one is perfect and I have found that people who must constantly brag or boast about how awesome their life is are usually the ones with the most problems...

a reply to: trollz

"Scientists" at Facebook? Lol...
I can think of a few more appropriate titles for these people...