Press 'don't like' on Facebook ploy
Published July 11, 2014
Editorial by Jacksonville Daily News, July 10, 2014.
Facebook is an extraordinary tool, but its pitfalls have become increasingly apparent. Users’ personal information, interests and habits are all fair game for the company, which has little compunction about analyzing the data and selling them to advertisers. Now Facebook has gone beyond capitalism and into creepy.
And we mean really creepy.
For a week in 2012, it seems, the company manipulated users’ news feeds as part of a psychology experiment to see whether happier or sadder content led users to write happier or sadder posts. The result? Facebook appears to have altered people’s emotional states without their awareness.
This was wrong on multiple levels. It was unethical for Facebook to conduct a psychological experiment without users’ informed consent. And it was especially wrong to do so in a way that played with the emotions of its users. That’s dangerous territory.
Facebook, which employs a secret algorithm to determine what users see on their news feeds, conducted its research by altering the feeds of some 700,000 users, increasing or decreasing the number of “positive” and “negative” messages they saw to study the “emotional contagion” of social networking. The company, together with two academic researchers, published the results this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the study, Facebook asserted that users had given informed consent, which is standard protocol in psychological research, when they agreed to the company’s terms of service, which caution that users’ data can be mined for analysis and research. But that’s disingenuous. It’s hard to believe that users who took the time to read Facebook’s 13,000-word service agreements would have understood they were signing on to be lab rats.
And we find it particularly disturbing on a professional level. Facebook handles the online commenting service for The Daily News and hundreds of other publications around the nation through corporate contracts and therefore, users could have possibly been exposed to this potential manipulation by Facebook.
That is flat wrong.
In response to the outrage, the Facebook researcher who designed the study apologized for “any anxiety it caused.” He added that the company will seek to improve its internal review practices for future research. Certainly Facebook needs to revisit its policies to ensure that its users are not unwilling participants in psychological research. If this research is so valuable, the company should seek true informed consent.
But Facebook also needs to address its cavalier attitude toward its users. The company has come under fire repeatedly for pushing the boundaries of privacy expectations only to be surprised by ferocious blowback. This latest controversy sends a troubling message to users that their personal information, their online activities and now even their feelings are all data points to be analyzed and manipulated according to the whims of a business.
We don’t care for such intrusions when government does it without notice. Facebook should meet the same standard.
July 11, 2014 at 1:49 pm
Norm Kelly says:
Take this case for instance. Facebook did research without specific permission. This author responded with outrage.
Remember when President Bush used the FISA court to get warrants to track phone calls where 1 of the participants was a suspected terrorist from another country? Remember how libs went ballistic with their complaints about invasion of privacy for the US citizen who was a participant in the phone call? Libs beleived President Bush was violating the law, and taking advantage of the FISA court.
Now that the current occupier is doing even more, even worse, spying on American citizens, libs are making excuses for it. Everyone of us is having our phone records reported to the NSA for analysis. Yet, libs have no issue with this. Is this because the Bush situation involved their buddies that should be protected - terrorists from the middle east? While the current NSA spying is being done on American citizens, many of whom disagree completely with the current occupier!
There has to be a reason that libs find some spying inappropriate, while other spying is deemed NECESSARY! Has ANY lib yet explained the difference? Has any lib yet explained why it's good to spy on Americans but bad to spy on suspected terrorists? Has ANY media outlet bothered to ask ANY lib pol, or even our very own K, why they had a fit in one case and support the other case? If any media type has asked a lib about this, has any media type written about the answer? Has anyone asked K her thoughts about spying on Americans? Shouldn't we know this before the election?
Libs, there should always be a few to remind us what we fight AGAINST! But not enough to have control!
