Privacy: Facebook's mood experiment
For one week in 2012, Facebook carried out a psychological experiment which aimed to manipulate the emotions of over 690,000 of its users. They did this by changing the content in users’ news feeds. Facebook didn’t seek consent from their users to do this experiment. They experienced criticism for the experiment and apologised, but the end result proved that Facebook could change the emotional state of its users. In this debate, students will explore whether Facebook should have carried out a mood experiment on users, without their consent.