Facebook investigated user mood through news feed experiment

Facebook conducted an experiment among hundreds of thousands of users. A team of employees looked at how people reacted to a news feed where positive or negative posts predominated. The users were not aware of the experiment.

A scientific report of the experiment performed appeared in the journal PNAS. Facebook conducted its study among a total of 689,003 people, who were not aware of this and were randomly selected. The Facebook staff experimented with displaying posts in the news feed of the users included in the study.

Two experiments were conducted simultaneously: one reducing the amount of negative posts in an individual user’s news feed and one reducing the amount of positive posts in the news feed. Negativity and positivity were measured by keywords, for which special software was used.

Both experiments had a control group for comparison. The outcome measure was the negativity or positivity of the posts that the user placed on Facebook. For example, the researchers wanted to see whether there is a connection between the emotion to which someone is exposed and the mood of the person in question.

The results show what Facebook calls emotional contagiousness. If someone is exposed to negative posts, which don’t necessarily have to be aimed at the user, there is a greater chance that that person will react negatively themselves. The same effect also occurs in reverse: with more positivity, the user also reacted more positively. According to Facebook, the experiment shows that emotions can be ‘contagious’ unconsciously.