[governance] FW: [Dewayne-Net] Facebook reveals news feed experiment to control emotions

[michael gurstein]

-----Original Message-----
From: dewayne-net at warpspeed.com [mailto:dewayne-net at warpspeed.com] On Behalf
Of Dewayne Hendricks
Sent: Monday, June 30, 2014 1:47 PM
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Facebook reveals news feed experiment to control
emotions

Facebook reveals news feed experiment to control emotions Protests over
secret study involving 689,000 users in which friends' postings were moved
to influence moods By Robert Booth Jun 29 2014
<http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-n
ews-feeds>

It already knows whether you are single or dating, the first school you went
to and whether you like or loathe Justin Bieber. But now Facebook, the
world's biggest social networking site, is facing a storm of protest after
it revealed it had discovered how to make users feel happier or sadder with
a few computer key strokes.

It has published details of a vast experiment in which it manipulated
information posted on 689,000 users' home pages and found it could make
people feel more positive or negative through a process of "emotional
contagion".

In a study with academics from Cornell and the University of California,
Facebook filtered users' news feeds - the flow of comments, videos, pictures
and web links posted by other people in their social network. One test
reduced users' exposure to their friends' "positive emotional content",
resulting in fewer positive posts of their own. Another test reduced
exposure to "negative emotional content" and the opposite happened.

The study concluded: "Emotions expressed by friends, via online social
networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first
experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social
networks."

Lawyers, internet activists and politicians said this weekend that the mass
experiment in emotional manipulation was "scandalous", "spooky" and
"disturbing".

On Sunday evening, a senior British MP called for a parliamentary
investigation into how Facebook and other social networks manipulated
emotional and psychological responses of users by editing information
supplied to them.

Jim Sheridan, a member of the Commons media select committee, said the
experiment was intrusive. "This is extraordinarily powerful stuff and if
there is not already legislation on this, then there should be to protect
people," he said. "They are manipulating material from people's personal
lives and I am worried about the ability of Facebook and others to
manipulate people's thoughts in politics or other areas. If people are being
thought-controlled in this kind of way there needs to be protection and they
at least need to know about it."

A Facebook spokeswoman said the research, published this month in the
journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US,
was carried out "to improve our services and to make the content people see
on Facebook as relevant and engaging as possible".

She said: "A big part of this is understanding how people respond to
different types of content, whether it's positive or negative in tone, news
from friends, or information from pages they follow."

But other commentators voiced fears that the process could be used for
political purposes in the runup to elections or to encourage people to stay
on the site by feeding them happy thoughts and so boosting advertising
revenues.

In a series of Twitter posts, Clay Johnson, the co-founder of Blue State
Digital, the firm that built and managed Barack Obama's online campaign for
the presidency in 2008, said: "The Facebook 'transmission of anger'
experiment is terrifying."

[snip]

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