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Facebook emotion manipulation study: an explanation

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Re: Facebook emotion manipulation study: an explanation

#101

Post by nness »

onewaystreet wrote: post #4
nness wrote: post #2

Not a single point in that response directly addresses why there was no informed consent in the study. There are reasons why research goes under ethical review before it is conducted, and this is certainly going to be a tough lesson for Facebook.

The study was approved by an ethical review board.

It appears I did make a mistake, the university did conduct an ethics review.

Although, I find that is all the more concerning, since you would hope that the university in question would have more ethical clout than an corporation.

Re: Facebook emotion manipulation study: an explanation

#102

Post by zaroth »

3rd3 wrote: post #72
zaroth wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is Facebook. Is has a tremendous effect on peoples lives. And that's precisely why it's worth $100B. This is nothing more than a tweak in their ranking algorithm -- much larger and even targeted/dynamic modifications occur all the time. How can a reasonable person be upset by this? If the study is unethical by any reasonable standard, does this amount to condemning the whole company, even the whole industry? Bec…

There is no difference between tinkering with an algorithm with the intention to negatively influence people's emotions and tinkering with an algorithm to make it work better?

Who is to say those two statements are at odds with one another?

Also, almost every A/B which results in a measurable impact in user response will have done so by positively vs. negatively impacting the users' emotions on the A/B legs of the study.

But more to the point, this is not even a fair characterization of what Facebook did. The made a tweak to their ranking algorithm which they deployed to 1/2500 of their users. Much later they discovered there was a extremely small but measurable impact to those users' engagement, and the types of words they included in their subsequent posts. They actually didn't know at all ahead of time what the effect would be, and in fact the effect they observed was the opposite of the widespread expectation.

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