Facebook defends social experiment with mood users

A Facebook researcher defends a social experiment that hid posts with positive or negative emotions to measure the effect on users’ moods. At the same time, the researcher seems to have reservations.

Facebook’s early 2012 investigation, in which users’ emotions were manipulated without their knowledge by deleting posts with positive or negative undertones, caused some controversy. Like this early a privacy activist wonders whether Facebook’s emotional tampering could have caused depressed people to commit suicide.

In a post on Facebook, one of the researchers, Adam Kramer, wrote that they thought it was important to investigate whether seeing a lot of positive content on Facebook can make people feel negative, for example if they get the feeling that nice things are passing them by. to go. At the same time, Kramer writes, Facebook wanted to investigate whether many negative posts caused people to avoid Facebook. The researchers didn’t want to upset anyone, Kramer writes, who goes on to say that in retrospect he wonders whether the investigation justifies the uproar it caused.

In the study, Facebook looked at whether users who see a relatively large number of positive or negative posts are influenced in their own posts as a result. Indeed, there appeared to be a connection: those who saw more positive posts were more positive in their own posts; the reverse was also true.