A data scientist employed by Facebook has apologized over a study that subjected nearly 700,000 users of the social media website to a psychiatric test without their knowledge.
The result of the 2012 experiment was published two weeks ago in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal. The paper detailed how Facebook’s data scientists manipulated the news feed of 689,003 users to gauge how users would react to seeing certain positive and negative status updates from their friends.
The study found that users who saw emotional status updates from their peers were likely to hang around longer on the platform, a phenomenon Facebook’s data scientist called “emotional contagion.” On the other hand, those who saw status updates with no emotion were less likely to engage on the platform.
Though the paper has been available for two weeks, it only recently received attention when an article published on the website AVClub.com made its rounds on social media. The majority reaction was less than positive.
“Let’s call the Facebook experiment what it is: a symptom of a much wider failure to think about ethics, power and consent on platforms,” researcher Kate Crawford wrote on Twitter.
Facebook was able to get away with the study because users actually do consent to these kinds of studies when they accept the website’s terms of use at signup.
“We…put together data from the information we already have about you, your friends, and others, so we can offer and suggest a variety of services and features,” the website says on a page called “Information we receive and how it is used.”
Adam Kramer, the data scientist who authored the controversial paper, says offering a better service for Facebook’s users is exactly what the experiment was designed to do.
“The goal of all our research at Facebook is to learn how to provide a better service,” Kramer wrote in a Facebook post Sunday evening. “I can tell you that our goal was never to upset anyone.”
Kramer wrote that while some posts were hidden and others elevated on a user’s news feed during Facebook’s study, “those posts were always visible on friends’ timelines and could have shown up on subsequent News Feed (reloads).”
“My co-authors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused,” Kramer wrote. “In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all this anxiety.”
But Forbes writer Dan Diamond argues Facebook has nothing to apologize for: The study was legal, within the lines of its terms of service and didn’t skirt ethical lines. Diamond notes that the reason for all the outrage over the study is because “Facebook users don’t like being messed with.”
“Facebook isn’t the only Web platform testing all kinds of interventions to gauge customer behavior,” Diamond wrote.
He’s right: Companies both online and offline have, for decades, conducted studies and focus groups to figure out the best methods to keep their customers coming back for more. Nobody got upset with McDonald’s when it changed its slogan to “I’m lovin’ it” or Coca-Cola with the slogan “Open Happiness,” both of which are designed to evoke a certain kind of response: Give us your money, and we’ll make your life better.
Facebook takes a lot of heat whenever it tweaks an algorithm or changes privacy settings, both of which it seems to do frequently. And the reason? It wants more user data (it’s one of the reasons you can’t log on to Facebook without having cookies enabled). The more user data it gets, the more information it can hand over to advertisers. It’s how Facebook keeps the employees fed and the lights on — and if users have a problem with it, perhaps this study is a much-needed reminder that life does exist without Facebook.
Matthew Keys is a contributing journalist for TheBlot Magazine.
