Facebook may have experimented with controlling your emotions without telling you

So, signing up for facebook also means that people can do social experiments without your knowledge or consent. Interesting for sure.

Source.

Researchers at Facebook ran an experiment on nearly 700,000 randomly chosen users to see if their overall emotional state could be manipulated by the types of posts they see in their feeds.

Think Progress reported on a scientific paper published on Friday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) entitled “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks” in which the researchers concluded that it is not just possible but very easy to drive emotional responses in users by controlling the content that they see.

Users of the social media platform consented to be experimented on by developers and researchers when they signed the Terms and Conditions necessary to open a Facebook account.

Their findings do indicate that apparently you can certainly change or influence an emotional state based on what is being fed to you in real time on social networks. I certainly would have thought that was true without the research, but I guess somebody needed some money spent before the budget roll over.

What do you guys think about this? Does Facebook have an obligation to clearly explain these things, without convoluted double speak-legalese?

Or is it the consumer's responsibility to be this well informed about what they are signing up for?

IMO it's a bit of both.

~Tenth

"Facebook comes out with a new way to publicly anger it's users."

Yeah, something tells me the real experiment is to see just how apathetic people are when finding out about their manipulative tactics.


Also, this has already been covered. Currently sitting at the very top of the page.

I just finished reading a conversation about that subject in this thread on the home page:
www.abovetopsecret.com...
Personally, I don't think I'm affected by the manipulation as much as I am by the dribble that some people lay out there.

a reply to: ThinkingCap

indeed it was posted.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Please continue there Thanks for the heads up

Closed.