No matter how you describe it, the end result is the same: Attach the words "emotional manipulation" to a practice that a company does, and people are going to feel a little incensed. Perhaps used. Possibly even a bit angry.
Such is the fallout from recent revelations that a Facebook data scientist and two university researchers manipulated the content of around 600,000 Facebook users' news feeds. The goal? To see how people might respond on Facebook if they were given more negative or more positive posts to view for a solid week.
It's a digital recreation of the psychological concept of "emotional contagion," or the notion that the moods of those you interact with on a daily basis can affect your mood positively or negatively. Researchers wanted to see if the experience could be recreated in the virtual environment with digital contacts, so they purposefully removed a chunk of positive posts or negative posts from an experimental set of users to see if there was any effect on their moods.
"In these conditions, when a person loaded their News Feed, posts that contained emotional content of the relevant emotional valence, each emotional post had between a 10 percent and 90 percent chance (based on their User ID) of being omitted from their News Feed for that specific viewing," reads the accompanying paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"It is important to note that this content was always available by viewing a friend's content directly by going to that friend's 'wall' or 'timeline,' rather than via the News Feed. Further, the omitted content may have appeared on prior or subsequent views of the News Feed. Finally, the experiment did not affect any direct messages sent from one user to another."
The result? Reducing the number of positive expressions in a News Feed appeared to make a person less likely to post positive things him or herself and more likely to post negative things. The opposite appeared to hold true when the number of negative expressions were reduced.
"Although these data provide, to our knowledge, some of the first experimental evidence to support the controversial claims that emotions can spread throughout a network, the effect sizes from the manipulations are small (as small as d = 0.001). These effects nonetheless matter given that the manipulation of the independent variable (presence of emotion in the News Feed) was minimal whereas the dependent variable (people's emotional expressions) is difficult to influence given the range of daily experiences that influence mood," read the researchers' paper.
However, the effects of running an experiment on a subset of its users seems to have also produced an effect of its own: irritation, with reactions ranging from describing the company's manipulations as "creepy," to questions regarding Facebook's decision to not specifically ask for user consent to participate in the study, to calls for Facebook to inform the users it attempted to emotionally manipulate. Some are even calling for increased regulation regarding Facebook's ability to run experiments on its users.
Here's Facebook's response:
"This research was conducted for a single week in 2012 and none of the data used was associated with a specific person's Facebook account. We do research to improve our services and to make the content people see on Facebook as relevant and engaging as possible. A big part of this is understanding how people respond to different types of content, whether it's positive or negative in tone, news from friends, or information from pages they follow. We carefully consider what research we do and have a strong internal review process. There is no unnecessary collection of people's data in connection with these research initiatives and all data is stored securely," said a Facebook spokesperson, as reported by Forbes.
For more, watch PCMag Live in the video below, which discusses Facebook's shady experiment.