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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)

#131

Post by yeuxardents »

mgraczyk wrote: post #118
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.

The outcome of this experiment is that for a few days, around 150k people posted ~0.3% more negative words on Facebook. Is that something engineers and data scientists should be imprisoned over? I think most US politicians cause bigger effects every time they tweet.

Yes, is it known whether anyone affected committed suicide? Was that a part of the test, did they take that in to effect, did they ensure there were signals that if that could happen they would lay off the negativity for those people? Any psychology course at a University on ethics shows this is mass experimentation without proper oversight.

I for one, do not believe that a bunch of twats in silicon valley give a crap about ethics, do you?

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

#132

Post by yeuxardents »

Google234 wrote: post #123
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.

Would you be happier if FB censored every negative post on their site? I’m sure there would be less unhappiness but would it be “better”?

Thats now what this is about.

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

#133

Post by fenderbluesjr »

jb775 wrote: post #34

I noticed during the election that whenever I glanced at the fb "watch" video section, it was videos of guys getting into fist fights, or videos containing disturbing violence. I don't ever watch or search for videos like this, so it's not like it was selected based on my watch history or something. At the time, I figured it was a psychological trick to suck me into viewing more ads since violence has that "can't loo…

I watch fight videos all the time. I enjoy them and I know many guys that do. It doesn't surprise me at all that it might suggest them for you if you are a young man and i don't think it has anything to do with the election

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

#134

Post by thatcat »

graeme wrote: post #63
thatcat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the definition of an unethical experiment design and would be considered academic misconduct if that were academic work. Regardless of intent, fb probably shouldn't be allowing front end devs to design psychological experiments at mass scale. https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Experimental_ethics

Doesn’t that suggest professional ethics are immoral? They block a temporary, one off experiment which could suggest how to avoid sadness. The alternative is relying on intuition only and possibly making people permanently sadder. Or is there a way to achieve this knowledge consistent with the field of research ethics? We saw this with challenge trials in the pandemic where ethicists fretted people would reject them…

Isn't every experiment temporary one off? Ethics are strict bc of the dark history of human experimentation.

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

#135

Post by thatcat »

mgraczyk wrote: post #122
urthor wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the profile of a data scientist at a F500 non tech company and at a company like FB is slightly different. Facebook's data science crew is known for being heavier on the stats lighter on the software (relatively speaking) and probably can design a good experiment. That said, anyone who signs up for a job at Facebook doesn't give a shit about ethical design of experiments.

Hi, I used to work on ML and ran experiments like this one at FB. Just want to point out that the effect of experiments like this on an individual is smaller than the effect of making the app start 0.1 seconds faster, or retraining the network used to filter hate speech. The only reason the effect is significant is because N>650k, so tiny effect sizes can be detected.

whats the variance on that effect?? doesn't a large data set like that just lead to type ii errors?

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

#136

Post by tobr »

emodendroket wrote: post #99
tobr wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a banal comparison. When a film makes you sad, you are aware of what is going on. If you are unusually sensitive to these types of emotions, you can read about the film ahead of time to see if you might want to avoid it.

Do you typically go read a synopsis of the entire plot of a film, including any surprise developments, before watching it?

No?

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

#137

Post by slver »

thatcat wrote: post #37
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…

That's the definition of an unethical experiment design and would be considered academic misconduct if that were academic work. Regardless of intent, fb probably shouldn't be allowing front end devs to design psychological experiments at mass scale. https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Experimental_ethics

Maybe it's unethical in academic context, but in public service context, you have an existing service, and you're in charge of improving it.

When you have an improved algorithm, would you change your algorithm all at once for everybody, or would you test your change on small % of users, before you go full-scale? You'd do the latter. There's no better option. Because if you're wrong, your impact is much more devastating.

In other words, there's always an algorithm filtering your feed. If that was unethical, it makes Facebook unethical by merely existing.

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

#138

Post by wruza »

xg15 wrote: post #109
wruza wrote: post #96

Honestly that sounds like “this stuff dealer is bad because they make people sad while they wait for a dose; I quit, clean for 2d 6h 19min”. No doubt facebook is evil, corporate monster, etc, but hey what about stopping being a junkie. The problem is not someone experimenting with your unhealthy addiction, it is your unhealthy addiction. At the early stages of the internet, most of the content was hidden, waiting for…

> The problem is not someone experimenting with your unhealthy addiction, it is your unhealthy addiction. Why is it my unhealthy addiction if a multi-billion dollar company uses all tools at their disposal to push me into said addiction?

I mean, it’s not their addiction and not their problem. Everyone tries to push/trick/force you into it, from drug cartels to facebook. You can’t do much with neither of them for a variety of reasons, thus it sounds reasonable to perceive it as something that you should refrain from by yourself.

And you can do that even without Quitting Facebook, just bookmark an url that has no feed in it. Personally I’m not using facebook, but e.g. youtube always tries to push me into viewing something. But I simply do not scroll the feed, and go to subs or search instead when I want something new. Only user’s laziness allows them to take control, and only a user is in control of their laziness. All of those who complain about the modern internet forget that old internet required you to “surf” it very actively. FAANG exists as a multi-trillion industry only because people are inert content junkies with a thumb.

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

#139

Post by [deleted] »

thatcat wrote: post #134
graeme wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t that suggest professional ethics are immoral? They block a temporary, one off experiment which could suggest how to avoid sadness. The alternative is relying on intuition only and possibly making people permanently sadder. Or is there a way to achieve this knowledge consistent with the field of research ethics? We saw this with challenge trials in the pandemic where ethicists fretted people would reject them…

Isn't every experiment temporary one off? Ethics are strict bc of the dark history of human experimentation.

[deleted]

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

#140

Post by [deleted] »

seattledev wrote: post #102
plaidfuji wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the article states that the study was designed by a data scientist. Not that that implies that any additional ethical considerations were taken into account.

Data scientist means someone who's had classes in stats and knows how to use software to analyze data. They don't cover how to run experiment and don't cover ethics

[deleted]
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