91–100 of 102 posts
Simple fix: "We're conducting a scientific study on mood for the next three months. Would you mind participating? The study won't require you to do anything special or take any further action. Y/N?" There we go kids, easy as pie; it's called consent to participate! Pretty easy to do without spilling the beans on the study.
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They only make the site better for you if you're on the "winning" side. If A/B tests made the site better for everyone being tested, they'd not be very useful. Unless you mean "they should make your website better for me [after the test is done]", in which case they have the same goal as Facebook's study.
That's what I said: A/B tests improve the site "in aggregate." The goal of this study was not to improve the site, though: it was to test a hypothesis about social psychology.
I'm going to try and avoid the minefield that is this research vs. ethics. One thought I've had is that the blowback against this incident is less about the research itself and how ethical it is, and more about perception of Facebook in general. My suspicion is a lot of the opposition at this point comes from long-simmering distrust of Facebook and the increasingly negative perception of its brand - this incident is…
The sentiment is generally something like 'I use facebook because it is too inconvenient not to, but I don't like it', which is a far cry from the initial 'facebook is this cool new thing that I wish more of my friends would use instead of '.
In that light it makes sense for facebook to acquire up-and-coming business that compete with them, directly or indirectly, and I imagine there are quite a few people at the company who worry about this situation.
And in that light it is especially strange for facebook to release a study like this. What did they think would happen?
There have been quite a few instances over the past months (or years) that really made me wonder whether facebook's biggest problem, as a company, is that they're stuck in a bubble. A newsfeed that seems to be made for specific types of users, privacy kerfuffles, apps that don't seem to take off, and so on.
'Dogfooding' is generally a smart approach, but it doesn't seem like the optimal approach when your product relies on the whole world for its success...
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I am really trying to understand both sides of this. Focusing on the actual research, what about it do you think requires informed consent? Do you understand how widespread this kind of research is? Literally everyone does this. The act of publishing can't be the ethical breach -- just focus on the research, what do you think they did wrong there?
Perhaps it could be summed up as "Attempting to negatively influence a visitor's mental state without their knowledge or consent IS NOT COOL."
People calling this unethical have to explain why it is but A/B testing is not.
Changing a product you provide to a customer is often fine, though there could be contract or consumer-protection law or other legalities to consider. This may be true even when your product is free ("see a lawyer"). So changing your website and trying it on a handful of your audience first is also fine. Assuming no legal issues, there is a general understanding that fixes and improvements happen, and that the client can choose not to participate at any time, so that situation is probably fine as well.
Also intent counts for a lot - "trying to find a better search tool" or other technical features are clear in what they are intending to accomplish: bugfixes and/or new features.
The problem starts when you are trying to experiment on people directly, where the entire goal of the project is to poke at people and see how they react. After seeing how that kind of activity can end up in WW2, we decided it was a far better idea to put some precautions in place. It's annoying (and makes medical testing MUCH more expensive), but this is one of those situations where it's better to be overly cautious.
What I don't understand about FB is that - compared to experiments with SERIOUS risk such as drug testing - the experiment was rather benign. It shouldn't have been very difficult to get a proper IRB stamp of approval. The informed consent part could (I suspect) have been handled with some web page with an overview of the experiment and an opt-in button.
(and no, opt-in wouldn't have affected the test if you do you statistics correctly and are careful in your language on the opt-in page)
Failure to do this relatively easy steps is unprofessional at best, and highly suspicious at worst. Acting like human experimentation is not even worth of such protections makes me wonder what kind of person the experimenter is (stupid? or just badly narcissistic?).
Actually doing such an experiment without the subject consent supplies the answer: the experimenter is both stupid and dangerously narcissistic.
The dividing line, is largely: are you trying to do things to people behind their back? Or are you including them in the decision to participate (or not participate)?
For more specific details, see your local ethics committee.
Based on the other comments, it appears that the difference between kosher A/B testing and unethical experimentation with dire mental health consequences is either "Did you publish a paper when you were done" or "Are you a big, noteworthy company".
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The assertion that this study refuted was that too much positive bias in a filtered source of information causes negative sentiment. Reducing said positive bias had heretofore unknown effects. The attempt was to learn, not to negatively influence anyone's mental state.
Just like the Milgram Experiment was designed to see whether a small number of people could be coerced into believing they are torturing and killing people when so ordered? It wasn't designed to cause mental distress, but to see what happened. You see, that's why there are ethics committees at Universities.
Wow, what an amazingly tone-deaf post. It demeans Facebook users who were offended at the company's actions into simpletons who did not really understand what the study was really about. Sample this: > Nobody's posts were "hidden," they just didn't show up on some loads of Feed. How is hiding any different from not showing up? > And at the end of the day, the actual impact on people in the experiment was the minimal…
Wow, what an amazingly tone-deaf post. It demeans Facebook users who were offended at the company's actions into simpletons who did not really understand what the study was really about. Sample this: > Nobody's posts were "hidden," they just didn't show up on some loads of Feed. How is hiding any different from not showing up? > And at the end of the day, the actual impact on people in the experiment was the minimal…
I think the experiment is still going on as it is not possible to show all posts in chronological order at all times
Not a single point in that response directly addresses why there was no informed consent in the study. There are reasons why research goes under ethical review before it is conducted, and this is certainly going to be a tough lesson for Facebook.
Experimenters have tell fibs in order to discover the truth about your behavior: the only way to prevent you from thinking of the word "elephant" is say the experiment is about cats. This is generally considered OK, provided that you won't be upset when you find out what was really going on. And, without the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to see why people would get upset about this experiment. I reckon Facebook us…
The issue here is that Facebook conducted behavioural experiments on participants whom were not informed that they were part of a study. It is unethical. Whilst the outcomes are tame for those involved, the shear number of those involved and Facebook's influence and presence in everyday life makes it all the more alarming that they attempted it in the first place.