| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Anger Follows Facebook’s Secret Study to Manipulate Emotions
‘Facebook is using us as lab rats, and not just to figure out which ads we’ll respond to but to actually change our emotions.’
by Jon Queally
(Photo: Flickr / cc / mkhmarketing)
New details surrounding how Facebook allowed academic researchers to conduct a secret experiment on nearly 700,000 of its users to determine if digital manipulation of their emotions could be achieved has spurred widespread condemnation and new fears about the power of such systems when turned against the millions of people who use them on a daily basis.
The experiment in question, which sought to document evidence of a “massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” was authorized by Facebook in 2012 and conducted with outside assistance by researchers at Cornell and the University of California.
As the Wall Street Journal describes it, the purpose of the live experiment was to “determine whether it could alter the emotional state of [Facebook] users and prompt them to post either more positive or negative content.” To achieve this, the site secretly and without the knowledge of those being subjected to the research “enabled an algorithm, for one week, to automatically omit content that contained words associated with either positive or negative emotions from the central news feeds of 689,003 users.”
Source: http://philosophers-stone.co.uk/wordpress/2014/06/anger-follows-facebooks-secret-study-to-manipulate-emotions/
