(Techdirt) As you may have heard (since it appears to have become the hyped up internet story of the weekend), the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) recently published a study done by Facebook, with an assist from researchers at UCSF and Cornell, in which they directly tried (and apparently succeeded) to manipulate the emotions of 689,003 users of Facebook for a week. The participants -- without realizing they were a part of the study -- had their news feeds "manipulated" so that they showed all good news or all bad news. The idea was to see if this made the users themselves feel good or bad. Contradicting some other research which found that looking at photos of your happy friends made you sad, this research apparently found that happy stuff in your feed makes you happy. But, what's got a lot of people up in arms is the other side of that coin: seeing a lot of negative stories in your feed, appears to make people mad.
There are, of course, many different ways to view this: and the immediate response from many is "damn, that's creepy." Even the editor of the study, admits to the Atlantic, that she found it to be questionable:
"I was concerned," she told me in a phone interview, "until I queried the authors and they said their local institutional review board had approved it—and apparently on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people's News Feeds all the time... I understand why people have concerns. I think their beef is with Facebook, really, not the research."
Read full article here.
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