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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)

#81

Post by dheera »

eptcyka wrote: post #56
dheera wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it creates bad feelings" If this is the hypothesis they are testing for, the problem is they subjected people to a psychological experiment without consenting to it, for the ultimate purpose of their own financial gain. How is that not malicious intent?

If you dislike a _b_ version of an a/b tested site to the point that you feel deeply dissappinted by it, were the people who designed the experiment operating with a malicious intent? I don't think facebook engineers or data scientists care what people feel when they're adjusting their models, they only care about time spent on their platform or some other overly reductionist metric. One could argue that chasing supe…

There's a difference between disappointment about a product (which is fine) and doing an experiment to test that might knowingly create bad feelings in someone's life in one cohort of your experiment.

What if an almost-suicidal person got the "b" version?

A/B testing should be used when you think, in good faith, that BOTH "a" and "b" versions could be good and want to know which one works better, not to confirm a hypothesis that "b" has a negative impact on users' personal lives.

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

#83

Post by dheera »

Aunche wrote: post #60
dheera wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it creates bad feelings" If this is the hypothesis they are testing for, the problem is they subjected people to a psychological experiment without consenting to it, for the ultimate purpose of their own financial gain. How is that not malicious intent?

Surely, people understand that Facebook makes changes to their website, and that these changes are based on data. That is all an experiment is. If Facebook wasn't allowed to experiment, they would never be allowed to change their interface or recommendation engine at all.

There's a difference between experimenting on the product, and conducting an experiment that deliberately puts one cohort of users in an environment hypothesized to create negative emotions.

A/B tests for the case where you honestly, in good faith, think both A or B could be good designs, but you don't know which one is better.

A/B testing is for product design changes, not psychology experiments. It is NOT for the primary intention of a psychology experiment with a group of subjects that didn't consent to a study, where either A or B has a suspected negative impact on emotions, and you're using A/B testing to confirm or deny that hypothesis.

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

#84

Post by seattle_spring »

fogof wrote: post #69

How sad did this experiment really make people? The chart in the study says that people who saw fewer positive posts used one percent fewer positive words and about 0.3% more negative words. But on the other hand, they were seeing fewer positive posts, so maybe they were just replying to the posts they saw in a way that was natural, without their inner emotional state being very affected.

Excuse me, but this is the HN bi-hourly "Facebook is evil" post (tm). Questioning the content is against the rules.

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

#85

Post by pindab0ter »

seattle_spring wrote: post #84
fogof wrote: post #69

How sad did this experiment really make people? The chart in the study says that people who saw fewer positive posts used one percent fewer positive words and about 0.3% more negative words. But on the other hand, they were seeing fewer positive posts, so maybe they were just replying to the posts they saw in a way that was natural, without their inner emotional state being very affected.

Excuse me, but this is the HN bi-hourly "Facebook is evil" post (tm). Questioning the content is against the rules.

There’s no need for this.

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

#87

Post by imwillofficial »

fogof wrote: post #69

How sad did this experiment really make people? The chart in the study says that people who saw fewer positive posts used one percent fewer positive words and about 0.3% more negative words. But on the other hand, they were seeing fewer positive posts, so maybe they were just replying to the posts they saw in a way that was natural, without their inner emotional state being very affected.

Does it matter?

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

#89

Post by shadowgovt »

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…

Much of that content is based on other people's watch histories.

It's similar to the process of trending topics on Twitter (and one of the reasons that space is such a garbage fire).

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

#90

Post by [deleted] »

pizza wrote: post #71
erik_seaberg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a movie makes the audience sad, it wins Oscars, we don't censor it. Why should the rules be different for Facebook?

It's hard to get a lot of positive reinforcement by interacting with like-minded others at scale through a movie. Facebook's original stated intent was to study contagion of emotion, which seems to me to suggest a multiplayer, interactive effect.

[deleted]
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