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Yes, that would be deeply unethical. And to make matters worse, I believe that’s a fairly accurate description of how Facebook works.
So how could someone ethically run social media of any stripe?
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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.
> 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. Because no one would ever lie or put noise in the "why I downvoted" field.
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Social media algorithms are designed to show you things which make you upset because that type of content is highly likely to "engage."
aren’t they designed to optimize for most engagement, in whichever way they can (which turns out to be with upsetting content)? Or are people actually selecting specifically upsetting stuff?
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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 p…
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Is it unethical to create an automated system that maximizes global unhappiness for profit?
When a movie makes the audience sad, it wins Oscars, we don't censor it. Why should the rules be different for Facebook?
At the early stages of the internet, most of the content was hidden, waiting for you to actively discover and bookmark it. Like you do with good places in your town - you find one, add it to your address book and visit occasionally. It was a slow process, full of findings, enjoyment and variety. Now everyone seems to sit at their mailbox, desperately waiting for another pack of junk mail to arrive. Facebook is just that - a postman who chooses from a variety of crap to push into your inbox. It doesn’t change lives unless people are too lazy to live by themselves.
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
You asked our permission so unfortunately this experiment is not comparable with Facebook’s.
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So how could someone ethically run social media of any stripe?
I don’t understand how this question can follow. Are you suggesting that social media simply must optimize for engagement and not pay attention to negative consequences?
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When a movie makes the audience sad, it wins Oscars, we don't censor it. Why should the rules be different for Facebook?
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.
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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
Which part of this conception of experimental ethics does this violate? Facebook's experiment did not directly cause the emotions, the posted content for that. Even if it did, this sort of thing is well within the bounds of normal experimentation with large systems. This is similar to claiming that traffic experiments which change the flow of cars, in term causing some people to experience more traffic and become unh…
There is a massive difference in studying and directing traffic to help make traffic flow better. The goal there is to improve driving for everyone. Facebook's goal is to intentionally make people unhappy for the sole purpose of making more money.