Facebook just released data suggesting that what it calls “emotional contagion” works just as well through your News Feed. The data came from a study it conducted by “playing” with the emotions of random users by serving up curated “news” in their News Feed .
That's right. The research paper , published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, reports that Facebook researchers wanted to understand whether the emotions we experience face-to-face can also be experienced digitally. So, the team created an algorithm that analyzed the words in News Feed posts. This way, they were able to categorize posts that evoked positive and negative emotions.
They then used this information to influence the emotions of 689,003 users for a week. Some users had a News Feed with posts that evoked negative emotions, while others had the exact opposite.
The findings of the study may seem very interesting. For the first time, we have statistical evidence that social media affects our emotions in a way that resembles human interaction.
Of course, it is very creepy to learn in retrospect that Facebook used so many regular users as subjects of a psychological experiment, without any of them ever knowing it.
Of course, Facebook's privacy policy covers the company, since each user has agreed to sign up for so many things that they don't even know about. Who reads carefully and analyzes the terms of use of the service before agreeing?
So, the next time you use Facebook, don't be surprised if you start feeling happy, sad, angry, etc.
