You've been a lab rat for Facebook

[Meresgi]

http://www.slate.com/articles/health...anipulate.html

The researchers, who are affiliated with Facebook, Cornell, and the University of California–San Francisco, tested whether reducing the number of positive messages people saw made those people less likely to post positive content themselves. The same went for negative messages: Would scrubbing posts with sad or angry words from someone’s Facebook feed make that person write fewer gloomy updates?

Basically Facebook has been manipulating newsfeeds to see if sad/happy news will change your mood (it does). They say they are covered because in the ToS it does say "research" will be conducted with your data, though most people don't see this as being that sort of research.

I washed my hands of facebook awhile ago, even then I didn't really even use it for anything other then posting humorous pictures, but I see fall out over this happening.

[bluefan]

I only made a Facebook account last year so I could sign up at random tables at PAX for swag. Don't have a single picture on my account and haven't checked it since last year lol.

[Meresgi]

Only reason to use Facebook is for Tinder for hookups, if you're over 50 years old and want to talk about family shit, or younger then 22 and think posting pictures of you drunk and doing black tar heroin at college will work out for you when looking for jobs.

[Day]

They been making my shit sad. I beleeb dat, every day someone dead or sick or need prayers, I hardly check it anymore shits depressing.

[Stef]

I fail to see how this is an issue. I mean I can understand ethical guidelines for research, but this is hardly any more invasive than advertising on any other website or on TV... or billboard advertising, or being anywhere outside of your own home.

“If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that’s experimentation,”

The thing is this could be said about anything. If I visit a news site like Foreign Affairs or Ars Technica I don't get to decide what articles are featured or which ads appear, let alone what psychological effect they have on me. We know Facebook (along with a lot of other websites) collects "anonymized" data (even if it's never truly anonymous) for various purposes including evaluating design and feature changes; I don't see how this is any different.

As others have said, if you don't like it don't use it. But to insinuate that Facebook is some sort of big, bad, evil company because it (OMG) showed selected users slightly more sad news... Maybe the whole issue of collecting data is a more sensitive topic in the US because of the general failings of the legal system over there, but here in Sweden the idea has never really troubled me since the "Liberal" part of Liberal Democracy protects us from the most egregious of adverse effects that could ever come from any type of online data collection. The panic just reminds me of the case a few years ago where French companies sued Google to have links to their sites removed from search results claiming infringement of Copyright. jackiechan.png

[Blubbartron]

I fail to see how this is an issue. I mean I can understand ethical guidelines for research, but this is hardly any more invasive than advertising on any other website or on TV... or billboard advertising, or being anywhere outside of your own home.

“If you are exposing people to something that causes changes in psychological status, that’s experimentation,”

The thing is this could be said about anything. If I visit a news site like Foreign Affairs or Ars Technica I don't get to decide what articles are featured or which ads appear, let alone what psychological effect they have on me. We know Facebook (along with a lot of other websites) collects "anonymized" data (even if it's never truly anonymous) for various purposes including evaluating design and feature changes; I don't see how this is any different.

As others have said, if you don't like it don't use it. But to insinuate that Facebook is some sort of big, bad, evil company because it (OMG) showed selected users slightly more sad news... Maybe the whole issue of collecting data is a more sensitive topic in the US because of the general failings of the legal system over there, but here in Sweden the idea has never really troubled me since the "Liberal" part of Liberal Democracy protects us from the most egregious of adverse effects that could ever come from any type of online data collection. The panic just reminds me of the case a few years ago where French companies sued Google to have links to their sites removed from search results claiming infringement of Copyright. jackiechan.png

No, this isn't as simple as removing news articles. They changed what posts from your friends you see by default.

People here probably remember when Woozie died, and his closer friends mentioned in the thread how they had just seen something on Facebook that was either ominous or atypical (I forget exactly), but imagine if his cries for help weren't being sent to his friends because his posts were determined to be "sad" (apologies for using Woozie's memory like this, but I feel the poignancy highlights the importance of this issue). I think there's a case to be made to hold Facebook/these researchers liable if someone's obviously suicide-ridden posts were swept under the rug by this algorithm.

[Waraji]

Another case of "Fuck Facebook".

[Karbuncle]

I can safely say for 98% of facebook users not a single fuck will be given outside an ironic "wtf facebook" facebook post.

[Salodin]

No, this isn't as simple as removing news articles. They changed what posts from your friends you see by default.

People here probably remember when Woozie died, and his closer friends mentioned in the thread how they had just seen something on Facebook that was either ominous or atypical (I forget exactly), but imagine if his cries for help weren't being sent to his friends because his posts were determined to be "sad" (apologies for using Woozie's memory like this, but I feel the poignancy highlights the importance of this issue). I think there's a case to be made to hold Facebook/these researchers liable if someone's obviously suicide-ridden posts were swept under the rug by this algorithm.

This right here!

[Quicklet]

And this is why people should be concerned about where big data is headed. When there is minimal transparency and virtually no accountability, companies are able to exploit psychological tendencies and subconscious habits for their own profit. Imagine if they found a correlation between what types of posts they presented to the user and how responsive the user was to advertising? It is absolutely unethical to do this and in a world where corporations didn't own the individual, Facebook would be getting called up to Congress over something like this. Instead, everyone just kind of shrugs and goes "Well what did you expect? Of course they do this!" as if we've already given into our corporate mass media overlords.

[Silenka]

That's pretty fucked up actually, and yet another reason I can point to when I explain to my friends and family why I will never have a facebook account.

[Meresgi]

I think people really don't understand the concept of meta data and what can be extrapolated from it. People are so willing to offer up so much personal data. At least it makes it easier for social engineering :D

[Karbuncle]

Lets be honest for a second, the people who used Facebook enough to be effected on a psychological level by this study were "Socially engineered" long before Facebook decided to play with their emotions. Ain't saying what Facebook did is right, nor am I attempting to justify or belittle the severity of this crap, just saying, theres a good chance they were simply beating dead horses.

I'm sure other companies have done this, but no on this scale i'd imagine...

[Correction]

From the text of the study:

Posts were determined to be positive or negative if they contained at least one positive or negative word, as defined by Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count sofrware (LIWC2007) (9) word counting system, which correlates with self-reported and physiological measures of well-being, and has been used in prior research on emotional expression (7, 8, 10).

Well, about that

This software application is described by its authors as:

The first LIWC application was developed as part of an exploratory study of language and disclosure (Francis, 1993; Pennebaker, 1993). As described below, the second version, LIWC2007, is an updated revision of the original application.

Note those dates. Long before social networks were founded, the LIWC was created to analyze large bodies of text — like a book, article, scientific paper, an essay written in an experimental condition, blog entries, or a transcript of a therapy session. Note the one thing all of these share in common — they are of good length, at minimum 400 words.

Bad methodology yields bad science. So they experimented on us to reach no useful conclusion.

[The Stig]

The only thing I need to know is, the more someone posts on Facebook, pretty much the more unintelligent/socially engineered they are. (Karbuncle I love the term socially engineered!)

[Meresgi]

For people who honestly have no problems with their data being harvested, please pm me or post your name and address along with a .txt of your browser history. Don't worry I would probably keep it more secure then 99% of these companies

[wipers]

For people who honestly have no problems with their data being harvested, please pm me or post your name and address along with a .txt of your browser history. Don't worry I would probably keep it more secure then 99% of these companies

Thomas Smith 123 Fake Street St. Louis Missouri 63110.

[Meresgi]

Thomas Smith 123 Fake Street St. Louis Missouri 63110.

Hmmm...something about this...don't seem to be adding up.

[Correction]

Hmmm...something about this...don't seem to be adding up.

https://goo.gl/maps/uP3qY

[Meresgi]

https://goo.gl/maps/uP3qY