Facebook's Experiment
I read about Facebook's experiment on its users this morning and although I was quite upset about it, to tell you the truth I was not surprised at all.
From WSJ:
News that Facebook conducted a massive psychological experiment on nearly 700,000 unwitting users in 2012 has caused an uproar, raising further questions about how Facebook and other social media sites use the wealth of data available to them.The experiment tried to gauge the impact of more positive or negative news feeds on users' emotions.
Facebook’s data scientists tried to see if the site could alter the emotional state of its users, or cause “emotional contagion,” and prompt them to post either more positive or negative content based on what they saw in their central news feeds.
The impetus for the study was an age-old complaint of some Facebook users: That going on Facebook and seeing all the great and wonderful things other people are doing makes people feel bad about their own lives.
You can read the rest of the articles here and here.
What do you think about the experiment? Do you feel it was unethical?
Ethics are relative. How can someone empirically state that something is unethical?
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