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Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be the final straw (2012)

theguardian.com

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Re: Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be the final straw (2012)

#11

Post by cryptoz »

chatmasta wrote: post #10
antiterra wrote: post #7

Product Person #1: Hey, here’s a writeup that says if we show too many positive posts to people that it creates bad feelings. Should we show less positive posts? Product Person #2: Not sure, wouldn’t negative posts make people feel worse? Product Person #1: Wow, I donno, maybe we should try adjusting additional posts people see one way a bit and see what happens? Product Person #2: Not a bad idea, how about we try bo…

I admit I didn’t read the article because I thought I knew the event it was referring to, but didn’t Facebook actually publish this as a psychology study? i.e. they didn’t just use it for A/B testing features but actually thought they were doing something “good” to the point of publishing a study about it. It’s laughable now lol.

Yes, they published the paper and publicly bragged about how successful they were in making hundreds of thousands of people feel sad.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf

Edit: And it is in their public defense of this paper that they think we all gave 'informed consent' to this kind of psychological manipulation when we signed up for Facebook because it's in the TOS.

They literally define 'informed consent' as the legal text in their TOS. I mean that's insane, they know their users don't read that before signing up. It's not f'ing informed or consent ugh this makes me so mad.

Also what kind of sick company puts into their TOS that they can emotionally manipulate you on purpose whenever they want? Fucked up.

Re: Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be the final straw (2012)

#14

Post by jwilber »

chatmasta wrote: post #5

Pre-2013 was a wild time on the internet. It seems like that’s when a lot of its nasty underbelly went mainstream. The Snowden leaks were a turning point, I think, when people realized “the NSA and corporations are spying on you” wasn’t just a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. It’s mind blowing to think that most major sites on the internet (including Amazon) were not using HTTPS at that time. It’s possible Amazon used…

It sounds like you’re trying to relate the ever changing adoption and development of web standards with longstanding ethical expectations in research.

Nevermind the fact that the former aren’t direct actions on customers (Amazon wasn’t not showing https for only certain users) while the latter is a direct, concentrated, understood action on customers.

The two aren’t similar at all.

Re: Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be the final straw (2012)

#16

Post by hackinthebochs »

I still don't see why I should be outraged over this. A user of facebook already consents to facebook displaying whatever content on their feed facebook chooses. Why should facebook require extra consent to gather scientific evidence on the effects of the content being displayed, given they are only analyzing data they already gather?

Re: Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be the final straw (2012)

#17

Post by jancsika »

Is it against the rules for me to use HN as a dating site? I'm going to pen-test it:

I enjoy cuddling, long walks on the beach, and services that do not run social experiments on me like something out of a cheap movie plot about a mad-scientist.

to contact this user please dial "jancsika" on your rotary phone now

Re: Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be the final straw (2012)

#18

Post by towergratis »

bserge wrote: post #8

Yes, indeed, we should all learn not to use our emotions in online discussions. People will say and do things that they would never say in real life, even under their real name, because of the disconnection from the actual person hearing/reading/seeing that. Funnily enough, this is how I quit Imgur for good. It's amazing. I posted something that I believed was right and got downvoted to hell. So I started asking peop…

It does affect you. Because you get the feeling you are "part" of the community.

I used to be very active in HN until I got into a heated discussion with someone and since then my HN "flag" privileges were stripped away.

I know I shouldn't care, but I couldn't help it. Now I am just lurking on HN and rarely reply with this new account using TOR and care as little about "karma" as I do about "producing value" with my replies to HN.

Re: Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be the final straw (2012)

#19

Post by cryptoz »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #16

I still don't see why I should be outraged over this. A user of facebook already consents to facebook displaying whatever content on their feed facebook chooses. Why should facebook require extra consent to gather scientific evidence on the effects of the content being displayed, given they are only analyzing data they already gather?

This is unethical psychological research against non-consenting adults and children that likely caused real harm. From a paper cited below,

> This Facebook study was conducted without consent and without appropriate oversight, and may have harmed both participants and non-participants. Kramer’s apology also puts the vast number of participants in context; a full 0.04% of Facebook’s users, or 1 in 2500, were unwitting subjects in this unethical research. Many of these people were almost certainly children, and many of the participants were probably suffering from depression. It is surprising and worrying that one of the world’s most prominent companies should treat both the emotions of its users and research ethics so carelessly. Steps must be taken to ensure that international psychological and medical studies involving social network users are regulated to the same standard as other human subjects research.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1747016115579535

Edit: Also you said something that confused me,

> given they are only analyzing data they already gather?

I'm not sure what this means. But they did not only analyze existing data, they created new data specifically intended to make people feel sad, then analyzed that data.

Re: Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be the final straw (2012)

#20

Post by jbverschoor »

yeuxardents wrote: post #4

This was the last straw for me, thats when I permabanned facebook from my life. This was an unauthorized, unguided, unethical, mass psychological experiment on human beings. Anyone involved should have gone to jail for crimes against humanity.

luckily we don't have the dependency on fb anynmore, since nobody forces "login with facebook" anymore thesem days
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