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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)

#31

Post by antiterra »

cryptoz wrote: post #19
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…

Again, that means if they just accepted the wisdom of the time, which was the ‘common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out’ and unilaterally limited positive content, they’d still possibly be creating more negative feelings and causing this ‘harm.’ But, you know, it’d be all ethical, since they didn’t look at the data or run an A/B test.

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

#32

Post by doublerabbit »

towergratis wrote: post #18
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…

Feel the same.

HN is exactly the same as Reddit, just a different crowd and less edge. It's nice to think that you can have a civil discussion on the HN platform but you can't. The whole internet karma/points is a flawed system.

For HN: You should have to give a reason to down votes. To give someone downvote permissions and then allow them to downvote on something they bias, isn't far.

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

#33

Post by emodendroket »

philplckthun wrote: post #29
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 ha…

Let's imagine hypothetically that sad, negative posts get more engagement by whatever metric Facebook uses, and Facebook was paying no attention to sentiments at all and ending up putting more sad posts on feeds. Would that have been unethical? I can't really see what would be so different.

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

#34

Post by jb775 »

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 look away" nature to it...but now that I think about it, they could have been intentionally stirring up angry emotions within the general population during the election cycle. Anyone else notice this?

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

#35

Post by ACow_Adonis »

I admit confusion. isn't unsolicited experimental psychological manipulation without consent just another word for most modern marketing?

I mean don't get me wrong, I dont like it and try to exclude it from my life and my families life, but there's pretty wide acceptance socially for this type of behaviour.

I would of thought the beauty industry would be an old perpetrator that should generally be investigated. going to shut down that?

and negatively instilling fear and distrust in a population without their consent for personal gain is about as old as politics itself?

isn't this practically mainstream media behaviour?

fomo? status anxiety? conspicuous consumption? I don't see why Facebook should be singled out for society-wide mandated and culturally supported practices.

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

#36

Post by luckylion »

"News media deliberately make people outraged. This ought to be the final straw".

I don't have issues with the study in general. You do want to know whether and how you can influence people in a positive or negative way, especially if you want to avoid it. There's really no other way to find out than to study it. They should've gotten clear consent for participation in that study, but that's about it from my point of view.

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

#37

Post by thatcat »

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

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

#40

Post by mhh__ »

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…

> This company deliberately made people sad

Which would be correct, surely?

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