The network's "Big Brother" tried to manipulate their emotions by hiding pleasant or unpleasant information from their newsfeed - See where the experiment was conducted and what results it yielded
The strong outcry of citizens and especially Internet users has been caused by the revelation of the secret conduct of a psychological experiment on Facebook in which over six hundred thousand cybernauts unknowingly participated.
The popular search engine used 689,003 English-speaking accounts to manipulate the psychology of users. Facebook's "Big Brother" was revealed in order to see if users' emotions are influenced by what they read and if they are contagious.
For seven days, some users saw more "news feeds" that were positively received while others saw those that were negatively commented on by their friends. According to the results of the psychological test conducted in 2012, those who received positive messages then proceeded to share their own messages and messages that moved in the same direction, while those who were exposed to negative news, comments and messages adopted exactly the same behavior.
For the authors of the study, what we see on Facebook also affects our own emotions. As the British newspapers “Guardian” and “Telegraph” point out, citing experts, Facebook has the absolute freedom to conduct such experiments with the permission of its users, who, when they open their account, are asked to agree or not to participate in such tests.
According to the research text co-authored by Adam Kramer (from Facebook's Core Data Science Team), Jamie Guillory (from the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, University of California) and Jeffrey Hancock (Departments of Communication and Information Science, Cornwall University), emotional states can be transferred to others through an emotional "virus", which can "infect" other people (just by being exposed to a friend who expresses an emotion).
During the experiment, as the text points out, the way in which users were exposed to expressions of emotions in the "news feed" was "manipulated" in order to determine whether exposure to emotions resulted in a change in publishing habits and tendencies. In particular, it was tested whether exposure to publications of emotional content resulted in the publication of material that was closer to the type of their exposure, that is, whether a type of emotional spread/contagion existed. The experiment involved people using the English version of Facebook.
According to the Telegraph newspaper, the experiments, which were conducted over seven days in early 2012 (January 11-18), analyzed more than three million posts containing 122 million words, four million of which were positive and 1.8 million negative. “These results suggest that the emotions expressed by friends, through online social networks, affect our emotional state. It is also emphasized that a “deprivation syndrome” was observed: people who were exposed to fewer emotional posts (of any kind) in their News Feed were less “expressive” in the following days. Facebook
, however, was quick to downplay the importance of… fraud. As the company claimed, there was no unnecessary collection of user data. However, the way the research was conducted raises questions about the “power” of the popular social network and the ethics of its choice to conduct the study in this way. For his part, British MP Jim Sheridan, a member of the relevant committee of the United Kingdom parliament, has called for an investigation to shed more light. As he stated in the “Guardian” newspaper, “I am concerned about the ability of Facebook and others to manipulate people’s thoughts in areas such as politics and elsewhere. If thought control is being exercised in this way, there should be protection, or at least knowledge about it.”
At the same time, Clay Johnson, co-founder of “Blue State Digital”, the company that developed and managed the online campaign of US President Barack Obama in 2008, described Facebook’s “anger transmission” experiment as “scary”, especially in the wake of the revelations of the Snowden case. However, the first author of the study, Adam Kramer, to justify the unjustified, wrote in a post on the social network that the reason for the study was the interest in the emotional effects of using Facebook on users and the improvement of services on the part of the company. “We felt it was important to explore the common concern that seeing friends post positive content results in negative emotions or a sense of exclusion. The goal of all our research on Facebook is to learn how to provide better services. Having designed the experiment myself, I can tell you that our goal was never to upset anyone. I can understand why some people have concerns, and my colleagues and I regret the way the research was described and the concern it caused. In retrospect, the research benefits of the paper may not justify all of this concern.”
Source: protothema.gr
