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

Deirdre Williams williams.deirdre at gmail.com
Mon Jun 30 10:45:32 EDT 2014


As an initial aside to "It already knows whether you are single or dating,
the first school you went
to and whether you like or loathe Justin Bieber." the calm assumption that
of course "we" always tell the truth always surprises me.

This report reminds me very forcefully of two things - JG Ballard's short
story "The Subliminal Man" which addresses among other things subliminal
advertising and the consumer society , (you'll find a brief discussion here
<http://www.ballardian.com/subliminal-billboards> if you are not familiar
with the story) and a 1949 lyric from South Pacific "You've got to be
carefully taught"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You've_Got_to_Be_Carefully_Taught>

The Internet is a wonderful teaching tool, which can be a very frightening
fact.

Deirdre


On 30 June 2014 09:41, michael gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:

> -----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]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
“The fundamental cure for poverty is not money but knowledge" Sir William
Arthur Lewis, Nobel Prize Economics, 1979
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