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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)

#21

Post by chatmasta »

cryptoz wrote: post #9
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…

There is no excuse for this. This was a morally bankrupt and exceedingly awful thing to do. I was absolutely furious when this happened and made it a life mission to help other people know this was going on. 99% of people don't know this event happened, still. I don't trust Facebook one bit. I assume they do this kind of illegal 'experiment' all the time now, and the only change is they stopped bragging about it. So…

> I assume they do this kind of illegal 'experiment' all the time now

Oh 100% they do. But hey at least they've contributed Presto back to the community!

> Lots of people don't see anything wrong with it

Surely that's not true. In 2021, Facebook is largely hated by people on all sides of all political spectrums. [Remember when people thought Zuck would run for president? Lol!]

(Edit:

> I'm now blocked from posting on HN

You're not blocked; you just can't reply to someone within a minute of their post past a certain nesting level.

(Edit edit: Oh guess you're right! That's annoying. :/ But I am enjoying our conversation via edit nonetheless!)

)

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

#23

Post by chatmasta »

jwilber wrote: post #14
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.

No, I'm comparing the complete disregard for user's privacy / well-being with the status quo at the time, which was "major payment portals don't even implement HTTPS."

If you want to document Facebook's ethical lapses, you could go all the way back to 2004. But it's only the past few years people started actually caring.

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

#24

Post by wpietri »

cryptoz wrote: post #11
chatmasta wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agreed. If people end up surprised about what they nominally consented to, it's not informed consent. Another example of Facebook's "move fast and break people" ethos.

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

#25

Post by antiterra »

cryptoz wrote: post #9
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…

There is no excuse for this. This was a morally bankrupt and exceedingly awful thing to do. I was absolutely furious when this happened and made it a life mission to help other people know this was going on. 99% of people don't know this event happened, still. I don't trust Facebook one bit. I assume they do this kind of illegal 'experiment' all the time now, and the only change is they stopped bragging about it. So…

That you’d prefer they either stayed ignorant or unconcerned to what changes they made and their effect is of questionable morality.

Edit re your edit response:

It is absurd to me that deciding whether to show more or less ‘I got a new car’ posts based on the resulting behavior is some kind of sinister event. Even the author of this article struggles to articulate why this isn’t just standard A/B testing.

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

#26

Post by neonological »

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.

No it's not a crime against humanity, let's not go that far and let's not unreasonably promote cancel culture by burning the witch at the stake before giving the issue some deep thought.

It's a much more complicated issue then you describe. Many corporate organizations have been selectively distributing information to deliberately influence sentiment for decades. Facebook is not the first nor will they be the last.

Restricting any entity from doing this is a complicated issue that has to do with restricting freedom of speech.

Fox news comes to mind when I think of another organization that does this deliberately. To add more complication to the issue one should consider the fact that the success of Fox news can also be attributed to it's customers: people. People choose what they want to hear, and many people prefer news viewed through a biased right leaning lens.

Just like how the above poster wants to paint this issue as a crime against humanity, I think part of the problem is that on some level we all want to lie to ourselves. We want to view the world in a very specific and certain black and white way.

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

#27

Post by neonological »

jancsika wrote: post #17

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

This is a psychological experiment on me and all the users on this site and I am now outraged.

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

#28

Post by jimbob45 »

I don’t know anyone that uses Facebook anymore that likes it. Everyone I know who uses it says, “I’m thinking I should delete it soon”. Universally, the number one criticism is, “All I ever wanted to see are my friends’ posts and every update shows me less and less of those”.

Does anyone actually know people who avidly use and love Facebook? It seems like Facebook is like the Christian church where the church and everyone says they go every Sunday but it’s really more like once a year at this point.

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

#29

Post by philplckthun »

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?

To be fair, since this has been a while ago it's hard to tell what to do about this. Personally I find it hard to draw any conclusions from this just due to the time that has passed. I don't use Facebook, so maybe it's just my distance from it. But it has happened and it's worth stating that this is basically a psychological experiment and not a simple A/B test, but at a company that most likely at the time didn't have an ethics board to review this.

Other sources list a couple of principles behind the ethics of psychological research. The relevant ones being:

- Minimise the risk of harm - Obtain informed consent

Some of them do state that the latter isn't always exactly possible, since that may influence the outcome.

But the fact of the matter is that Facebook did an A/B test that could inflect serious harm on the quality of life of the participants, who weren't aware of any research being conducted. The latter sounds like it'd be at least the minimum here.

So, I'm not a psychologist, but this does sound like it shouldn't have happened in this way. There were definitely more ethical ways in running this experiment that wouldn't have involved 700K unknowing and potentially unwilling participants.

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