11 ms·

Facebook emotion manipulation study: an explanation

72 points by mrmaddog 12y ago

nness 12y ago
Not a single point in that response directly addresses why there was no informed consent in the study. There are reasons why research goes under ethical review before it is conducted, and this is certainly going to be a tough lesson for Facebook.
- onewaystreet 12y ago
  The study was approved by an ethical review board.
  - why-el 12y ago
    The parent is talking about subject consent, not board approval. These are two vastly different things.
    - onewaystreet 12y ago
      >There are reasons why research goes under ethical review before it is conducted Did you miss that line?
      - jacquesm 12y ago
        > Did you miss that line? Do you understand the word 'consent'?
        onewaystreet 12y ago
        The line I quoted implies that the OP thinks that the research did not go under ethical review because if it had they would have required informed consent. But it did and they did not.
        jacquesm 12y ago
        Ethical review by facebook is not ethical review. That's like asking a serial killer about his opinion of murder.
        onewaystreet 12y ago
        It was also reviewed by a Cornell IRB.
        jacquesm 12y ago
        I'm fairly sure they will have some discussion about this there. Look, mistakes were made. These could have been addressed with a suitable apology. Instead you get this bs and hiding being 'but it was reviewed' when clearly there is a disconnect between the way this study is perceived by the subjects and the people that conducted it and those that reviewed it. Maybe it is that facebook is not exactly associated with ethical conduct, maybe it is that the review boards were asleep at the switch, maybe it is that in a corporate context ethics is so far removed from the stated goals that such discussions are meaningless. But for all the review that took place and all the points in time at which this study could have been halted the fact that nobody steps up and says: "we were wrong to do this" tells you more than enough about the state of ethics at facebook. And I'm not at all surprised, there is a good reason I don't have an account there. But I'm still surprised at how bad they are handling the fall-out from this. They're essentially making it worse, not better. Do you work for facebook?
        onewaystreet 12y ago
        All I was doing was correcting the OP. You can't ask why it was approved if you think it wasn't. The reason why Facebook isn't apologizing is because they do this kind of research all the time in the form of A/B tests. It opens a can of worms for them to suggest they did something wrong.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
  - nness 12y ago
    It appears I did make a mistake, the university did conduct an ethics review. Although, I find that is all the more concerning, since you would hope that the university in question would have more ethical clout than an corporation.
- cududa 12y ago
  I believe the study was highly unethical. However, in many studies participants have no idea what's being studied about them. The participant content angle seems less ominous than the rest of it, and might be detracting from discussing more serious ethical implications that come from optimizing user engagement and it's derivative forms.
- thisrod 12y ago
  Experimenters have tell fibs in order to discover the truth about your behavior: the only way to prevent you from thinking of the word "elephant" is say the experiment is about cats. This is generally considered OK, provided that you won't be upset when you find out what was really going on. And, without the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to see why people would get upset about this experiment. I reckon Facebook users are more upset by the truth, that their "personal" feelings are so influenced by trivial aspects of their environment, than by the way Facebook demonstrated it. The truth sometimes hurts, but science isn't to blame.
  - amirmc 12y ago
    Those people generally get to decide for themselves if they even want to be part of the experiment. They also have the right to opt-out at any given time during the experiment. Neither of those happened here.
  - nness 12y ago
    That's not quite right; Even in circumstances where participants are mislead for other purposes, they are still informed that they are taking part in an experiment. The issue here is that Facebook conducted behavioural experiments on participants whom were not informed that they were part of a study. It is unethical. Whilst the outcomes are tame for those involved, the shear number of those involved and Facebook's influence and presence in everyday life makes it all the more alarming that they attempted it in the first place.
datakid 12y ago
There's not really any excuse you can give at all, FB. I'm astounded that you didn't apologise without reservation and implement an end use agreement change that specified you wouldn't do it again. Messing with people's mental health is outrageous.
gemma 12y ago
I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety. Ignoring the classic "I'm sorry you were freaked out" non-apology here, this response completely misses the point, and tries to re-frame the concept of informed consent into an inconsequential piece of red tape that anxious people worry about. People were made subjects of a scientific experiment without their knowledge or consent. It doesn't matter that Facebook took steps to make the changes as small as possible; it doesn't matter that the effect on the individual subjects may have been minor; it doesn't matter that the results were interesting. It was an ethical breach, and this tone-deaf response is fairly unsettling.
- elpool2 12y ago
  Is it an ethical breach if I don't get informed consent from users when I do A/B testing on my website? Or is it only unethical if I publish the results afterwards? Or is it only if I'm actually trying to affect the user's mood specifically?
  - cududa 12y ago
    This is where the real discussion needs to focus. These are the hard questions we need to consider
  - gammarator 12y ago
    A/B tests are different, though: in aggregate, they should make your website better for me, the user. Here the user is just fodder for an academic's fairly trivial journal article (my friends' feelings affect my feelings!). Who decides what experiments social scientists get to run on 1/7th of the world's population?
    - akerl_ 12y ago
      They only make the site better for you if you're on the "winning" side. If A/B tests made the site better for everyone being tested, they'd not be very useful. Unless you mean "they should make your website better for me [after the test is done]", in which case they have the same goal as Facebook's study.
cwal37 12y ago
Universities and think tanks have internal review boards for a reason. The fact that Facebook can make use of its users' data in other (business-related) avenues does not excuse them from the most basic of research ethics. It did pass the muster of Cornell's review board, but that was after the data was actually collected, which amounts to ex post facto approval.
gammarator 12y ago
When addressing criticism, it's not great to start "Ok so." (Or "Calm Down. Breathe. We Hear You" [1], to dig farther back in time.) [1] http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/calm-down-breathe-we-hear-you/2208197130 http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/calm-down-breathe-we-...
- baddox 12y ago
  Do you have any thoughts about the explanation itself? I made it past the first two words, and thought the explanation was fairly reasonable and satisfying.
  - gammarator 12y ago
    The last paragraph does not give me warm feelings about Facebook's internal controls on this kind of research: "While we’ve always considered what research we do carefully, we (not just me, several other researchers at Facebook) have been working on improving our internal review practices. The experiment in question was run in early 2012, and we have come a long way since then."
smokeyj 12y ago
> The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product. That.. or getting users to click more ads. Maybe ad inventory can be optimized for people in an certain emotional state, and the user's wall can be used to induce the most profitable state of mind for fb's available ad inventory. That would be awesome in an evil villain kind of way.
- baddox 12y ago
  > That.. or getting users to click more ads. Or both, with no contradictions at all.
  - smokeyj 12y ago
    The omission of truth is more disingenuous than contradictory.
onewaystreet 12y ago
People calling this unethical have to explain why it is but A/B testing is not.
- baddox 12y ago
  Not even just A/B testing. Any form of interaction which is intended to alter the mood or beliefs of any person, including visual design, advertising, marketing, etc.
  - dublinben 12y ago
    >advertising, marketing, etc. I have no problem claiming that this is usually unethical.
    - baddox 12y ago
      I strongly disagree, but fair enough, if you're consistent. I'm curious, what is your ethical reasoning behind that? Do you oppose markets, or just communication from producers to consumers in markets?
      - sooheon 12y ago
        The active pursuit of more effective means of psychological manipulation seems to be the reason most people have a beef with marketing. Marketing is never about fully honest, fact based "communication from producers to consumers." Distortion, concealment, and need-creation is more marketing's forte. Marketers don't say: "this is our product, buy it if you need it." They say: "here is why you want to buy our product."
- napsterbr 12y ago
  A/B testing is for commercial purposes, it's wildly different when you are testing the user's psychological state.
  - yazinsai 12y ago
zaroth 12y ago
It seems to be that Facebook did something like an A/B test of their ranking algorithm, and then did a cohort study to see if there were any longer term impact. If what they did requires informed consent, what about when the end goal is maximizing click through rate, e.g. by inciting an emotional response? Let's say FB finds that certain types of posts in the feed cause a nearby ad to be clicked on more. They determine this through pervasive testing of everything that you see and do on their site. They could then adjust their algorithm to account for this behavior to increase clicks/profit. I think the actions FB takes to monetize the user base are not only more intrusive by far, they are actively searching for and exploiting these effects for profit. If informed consent for TFA is not ridiculous, then I think we have much bigger problems on our hands? What am I missing about the informed consent issue?
- kevingadd 12y ago
  You're not missing anything. Informed consent is important for many things currently classified as A/B tests and it isn't currently acquired by anyone. There are many existing products that rely on A/B tests to identify the best way to psychologically manipulate (if not addict) their customers (F2P games, online gambling, etc.)
yazinsai 12y ago
This comment on the piece aptly sums up my response, it's by Sean Tucker: Adam, I don't know you -- I came here from the Buzzfeed article criticizing the ethics of the study that linked to this post, but it appears we do have a friend in common. I just have to ask - you honestly had a hypothesis that amounted to 'perhaps we can make people more depressed,' and decided to test it on a group that hadn't consented to the experiment, with no way to track its impact on their actual lives, only on the language they used in their Facebook posts? And you ask us to trust that this passed an internal review so it's ethical? Please take a moment to step back and consider that. That appears to have been the train of thought that led to this. That's appalling. Completely appalling. The Atlantic piece is right -- there's absolutely no way this passes APA deceptive research standards. Beyond that, you'll never know what impact this actually had on depressed people. You can only measure what they posted to Facebook, which isn't a particularly meaningful or realistic indicator of their emotional state. If this passed an internal review board, that's only proof that Facebook's internal review standards aren't what they need to be. You're in a position of extraordinary power, with access to more subscribers than any other field study in history, a larger population than most nations, and subject only to how you review yourselves. You could deceive yourself into believing you have informed consent because everyone clicked 'accept' on the Terms of Service years ago, but there's no way even you think that's a meaningful standard. I trust you're a reasonable person who doesn't set out to cross ethical boundaries. But on this one, I think Facebook needs to admit it did and make some changes. This study was unethical by any reasonable standard. There's nothing wrong with admitting that and figuring out a way to do better. There's a lot wrong with going ahead with anything like this, ever again.
- zaroth 12y ago
  This is Facebook. Is has a tremendous effect on peoples lives. And that's precisely why it's worth $100B. This is nothing more than a tweak in their ranking algorithm -- much larger and even targeted/dynamic modifications occur all the time. How can a reasonable person be upset by this? If the study is unethical by any reasonable standard, does this amount to condemning the whole company, even the whole industry? Because if this is unethical, you are calling out an extremely widespread practice...
brainsareneat 12y ago
I wonder where the line is between A/B testing and 'psychological experimentation' and when it's been crossed. Was it crossed just because it was published in PNAS? The outraged don't seem to think so. What if I'm Amazon or Yelp, and I want to choose review snippets? Is looking for emotionally charged ones and testing to see how that impacts users wrong? What if it's more direct psychological manipulation? What if I run a productivity app, and I want to see how giving people encouraging tips, like 'Try starting the day by doing one thing really well.' impacts their item completion rate. I'm doing psychological experimentation. I'm not getting my users' permission. But I am helping them. And it's a valid question - maybe these helpful tips actually end up hurting users. I should test this behavior, not just implement it wholesale. It seems like Facebook had a valid question, and they didn't know what the answer was. Did they go wrong when they published it in PNAS? Or was it wrong to implement the algorithm in the first place? I don't think it was.
- kevingadd 12y ago
  The main indications that a line was crossed are the combination of a blatantly questionable hypothesis ('we can make people depressed or unhappy') with an intentional lack of informed consent & a huge set of test subjects. If you're doing medical testing in order to roll something out as a pharmaceutical for prescription use or over-the-counter sales, the tests are rolled out in stages, with initial testing being done on a very small number of patients under extreme scrutiny, and even that is only done after the medication has been vetted carefully using animal models. It's extremely important to avoid harming your test subjects. In comparison, they basically went full-steam on this experiment on hundreds of thousands of people despite the fact that emotional manipulation of this sort is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. When I say extremely dangerous I mean potentially life-threatening.
akerl_ 12y ago
Based on the other comments, it appears that the difference between kosher A/B testing and unethical experimentation with dire mental health consequences is either "Did you publish a paper when you were done" or "Are you a big, noteworthy company".
- elpool2 12y ago
  I'd say that (based on comments here) the real different is intent. People seem to be suggesting that the exact same experiment, but measuring ad-clicks instead of emotional state, would be a perfectly fine A/B test. It doesn't matter that the experiment manipulated people's emotions, it matters that Facebook wanted to manipulate people's emotions.
gouggoug 12y ago
For those like me who lived under a rock, here's the study: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/05/29/1320040111 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/05/29/1320040111
- toufka 12y ago
  In their summary there's a pretty massive gap in their lack of obtaining informed consent and how dangerous that might be: "Significance: We show, via a massive (N=689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues."
potatolicious 12y ago
I'm going to try and avoid the minefield that is this research vs. ethics. One thought I've had is that the blowback against this incident is less about the research itself and how ethical it is, and more about perception of Facebook in general. My suspicion is a lot of the opposition at this point comes from long-simmering distrust of Facebook and the increasingly negative perception of its brand - this incident is merely the straw that broke the camel's back, for some. And if the popular response to this revelation reflects people's general views on Facebook, it's not good for the company.
- polarix 12y ago
  It's also, unfortunately, deeply harmful to humanity. http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2014/06/28/in-defense-of-facebook/ http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2014/06/28/in-defense-of-face... > by far the most likely outcome of the backlash Facebook is currently experience is that, in future, its leadership will be less likely to allow its data scientists to publish their findings in the scientific literature
- mercer 12y ago
  I'm still surprised to discover how many of my friends and acquaintances have a negative view of facebook. Many of them are not very critical of things (and care little about their privacy, for example). The sentiment is generally something like 'I use facebook because it is too inconvenient not to, but I don't like it', which is a far cry from the initial 'facebook is this cool new thing that I wish more of my friends would use instead of <insert usually shitty local social network>'. In that light it makes sense for facebook to acquire up-and-coming business that compete with them, directly or indirectly, and I imagine there are quite a few people at the company who worry about this situation. And in that light it is especially strange for facebook to release a study like this. What did they think would happen? There have been quite a few instances over the past months (or years) that really made me wonder whether facebook's biggest problem, as a company, is that they're stuck in a bubble. A newsfeed that seems to be made for specific types of users, privacy kerfuffles, apps that don't seem to take off, and so on. 'Dogfooding' is generally a smart approach, but it doesn't seem like the optimal approach when your product relies on the whole world for its success...
r0h1n 12y ago
Wow, what an amazingly tone-deaf post. It demeans Facebook users who were offended at the company's actions into simpletons who did not really understand what the study was really about. Sample this: > Nobody's posts were "hidden," they just didn't show up on some loads of Feed. How is hiding any different from not showing up? > And at the end of the day, the actual impact on people in the experiment was the minimal amount to statistically detect it. Not what your own study claimed. > I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. We are not sorry about the research, but only for "the way the paper described it". > In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety. In hindsight, our users are hyperventilating frogs. They should learn how to relax in the nice warm(ing) Facebook waters.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- zaroth 12y ago
  I am really trying to understand both sides of this. Focusing on the actual research, what about it do you think requires informed consent? Do you understand how widespread this kind of research is? Literally everyone does this. The act of publishing can't be the ethical breach -- just focus on the research, what do you think they did wrong there?
  - jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
    Perhaps it could be summed up as "Attempting to negatively influence a visitor's mental state without their knowledge or consent IS NOT COOL."
    - onewaystreet 12y ago
      So much advertising could be said to negatively influence a person's mental state. These are not simple questions with simple answers.
OrwellianChild 12y ago
Am I alone in being completely un-surprised and accepting of Facebook doing research in this way on its users? The News Feed as an interface for using FB is and has always been an evolving product and in the control of FB. They've been constantly messing with it, A/B testing different combinations of user/advertiser content and post/comment structure. They do this to test outcomes, and achieve goals that most likely include (and are certainly not limited to): - Optimizing ad targeting - Maximizing click-thru - Maximizing engagement - Minimizing abandonment/bounce rates The News Feed already doesn't show you all your friends' posts and hasn't for quite some time. How they choose to "curate" what they do show is going to be dictated by their incentives/needs. Getting outraged about any of this seems akin to getting pissed that the new season of your favorite TV show sucked... Edited for formatting...
- kevingadd 12y ago
  You're not alone, but I think you do yourself a disservice by underestimating the potential negative impact of an experiment designed for the purpose of manipulating a customer's emotions. There's no defensible business objective here, and furthermore, any business objective that relies on this kind of emotional manipulation is suspect. Intentionally making a customer depressed is not something you fuck around with. It's incredibly dangerous, and doing it to a huge subset of your audience with no mechanisms to ensure you don't inflict real harm is utterly reckless and irresponsible. The individual mechanisms and approach used here for the experiment are not, in and of themselves, objectionable. Many A/B tests are wholly defensible. The end goal and process are the problem here.
  - amirmc 12y ago
    > "... any business objective that relies on this kind of emotional manipulation is suspect." So all modern day advertising then, that attempts to create a connection with the viewer/reader (as opposed to presenting bare facts). I agree that there was a process problem from the point of view of a research study but had this just been an A/B test for engagement levels, we might never have known what Facebook did.
alx 12y ago
Does someone remember the name of the NSA program concerning psychological manipulation on social networks ?
- alx 12y ago
  GCHQ, NSA ‘infiltrate’ social media to spread disinformation, with slide concerning psychology aspect of social network, including facebook : http://inserbia.info/today/2014/04/gchq-nsa-infiltrate-social-media-to-spread-disinformation-and-propaganda-report/ http://inserbia.info/today/2014/04/gchq-nsa-infiltrate-socia... The Intercept article concerning JTRIG actions on social networks : https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula... This study would fit pretty well in documenting possible manipulations.
natural219 12y ago
For posterity's sake, I want to clarify what is going on here. What's been happening, over the last five years, is that American society has become more trigger-happy in deducing "accurate" moral conclusions from following online media outlets. I outlined some of this in cjohnson.io/2014/context, although I didn't appreciate the full power of this conclusion at the time, and so the essay mostly falls short to explain the entirety of what's happening currently. In a nutshell: The Web has broken down barriers between contexts that used to live in harmony, ignorant of each other. Now, as the incompatibility of these contexts come into full focus, society has no choice but to accept the fluidity of context in the information age, or tear itself apart at the seams. All that was needed to precipitate the decline of Facebook (oh yes, Facebook is going down, short now while supplies last) was some combination of words and contexts that fully elucidate the power of online advertising / data aggregation to have real impact upon people's lives. Put in terms that the "average person" can understand, the impact of this story will be devastating. I feel so bad for the Facebook PR team -- they're simply out of their league here. The reason this scandal will be the one we read about in the history books is because it provides the chain link between two separate, but very powerful contexts: 1, the context of Nazi-esque social experimentation, and 2, the run-of-the-mill SaaS-style marketing that has come to characterize, well, pretty much every large startup in the valley. We've reached a point where nobody knows what is going to happen next. Best of luck, people.
xenadu02 12y ago
Simple fix: "We're conducting a scientific study on mood for the next three months. Would you mind participating? The study won't require you to do anything special or take any further action. Y/N?" There we go kids, easy as pie; it's called consent to participate! Pretty easy to do without spilling the beans on the study.
- chris_wot 12y ago
  This is a wider issue, but how do they prevent knowledge of the experiment adversely affecting the results?

72 points by mrmaddog 12y ago

nness 12y ago

Not a single point in that response directly addresses why there was no informed consent in the study. There are reasons why research goes under ethical review before it is conducted, and this is certainly going to be a tough lesson for Facebook.

onewaystreet 12y ago
The study was approved by an ethical review board.
- why-el 12y ago
  The parent is talking about subject consent, not board approval. These are two vastly different things.
  - onewaystreet 12y ago
    >There are reasons why research goes under ethical review before it is conducted Did you miss that line?
    - jacquesm 12y ago
      > Did you miss that line? Do you understand the word 'consent'?
      - onewaystreet 12y ago
        The line I quoted implies that the OP thinks that the research did not go under ethical review because if it had they would have required informed consent. But it did and they did not.
        jacquesm 12y ago
        Ethical review by facebook is not ethical review. That's like asking a serial killer about his opinion of murder.
        onewaystreet 12y ago
        It was also reviewed by a Cornell IRB.
        jacquesm 12y ago
        I'm fairly sure they will have some discussion about this there. Look, mistakes were made. These could have been addressed with a suitable apology. Instead you get this bs and hiding being 'but it was reviewed' when clearly there is a disconnect between the way this study is perceived by the subjects and the people that conducted it and those that reviewed it. Maybe it is that facebook is not exactly associated with ethical conduct, maybe it is that the review boards were asleep at the switch, maybe it is that in a corporate context ethics is so far removed from the stated goals that such discussions are meaningless. But for all the review that took place and all the points in time at which this study could have been halted the fact that nobody steps up and says: "we were wrong to do this" tells you more than enough about the state of ethics at facebook. And I'm not at all surprised, there is a good reason I don't have an account there. But I'm still surprised at how bad they are handling the fall-out from this. They're essentially making it worse, not better. Do you work for facebook?
        onewaystreet 12y ago
        All I was doing was correcting the OP. You can't ask why it was approved if you think it wasn't. The reason why Facebook isn't apologizing is because they do this kind of research all the time in the form of A/B tests. It opens a can of worms for them to suggest they did something wrong.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
- nness 12y ago
  It appears I did make a mistake, the university did conduct an ethics review. Although, I find that is all the more concerning, since you would hope that the university in question would have more ethical clout than an corporation.
cududa 12y ago
I believe the study was highly unethical. However, in many studies participants have no idea what's being studied about them. The participant content angle seems less ominous than the rest of it, and might be detracting from discussing more serious ethical implications that come from optimizing user engagement and it's derivative forms.
thisrod 12y ago
Experimenters have tell fibs in order to discover the truth about your behavior: the only way to prevent you from thinking of the word "elephant" is say the experiment is about cats. This is generally considered OK, provided that you won't be upset when you find out what was really going on. And, without the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to see why people would get upset about this experiment. I reckon Facebook users are more upset by the truth, that their "personal" feelings are so influenced by trivial aspects of their environment, than by the way Facebook demonstrated it. The truth sometimes hurts, but science isn't to blame.
- amirmc 12y ago
  Those people generally get to decide for themselves if they even want to be part of the experiment. They also have the right to opt-out at any given time during the experiment. Neither of those happened here.
- nness 12y ago
  That's not quite right; Even in circumstances where participants are mislead for other purposes, they are still informed that they are taking part in an experiment. The issue here is that Facebook conducted behavioural experiments on participants whom were not informed that they were part of a study. It is unethical. Whilst the outcomes are tame for those involved, the shear number of those involved and Facebook's influence and presence in everyday life makes it all the more alarming that they attempted it in the first place.

datakid 12y ago

There's not really any excuse you can give at all, FB. I'm astounded that you didn't apologise without reservation and implement an end use agreement change that specified you wouldn't do it again. Messing with people's mental health is outrageous.

gemma 12y ago

I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety. Ignoring the classic "I'm sorry you were freaked out" non-apology here, this response completely misses the point, and tries to re-frame the concept of informed consent into an inconsequential piece of red tape that anxious people worry about. People were made subjects of a scientific experiment without their knowledge or consent. It doesn't matter that Facebook took steps to make the changes as small as possible; it doesn't matter that the effect on the individual subjects may have been minor; it doesn't matter that the results were interesting. It was an ethical breach, and this tone-deaf response is fairly unsettling.

elpool2 12y ago
Is it an ethical breach if I don't get informed consent from users when I do A/B testing on my website? Or is it only unethical if I publish the results afterwards? Or is it only if I'm actually trying to affect the user's mood specifically?
- cududa 12y ago
  This is where the real discussion needs to focus. These are the hard questions we need to consider
- gammarator 12y ago
  A/B tests are different, though: in aggregate, they should make your website better for me, the user. Here the user is just fodder for an academic's fairly trivial journal article (my friends' feelings affect my feelings!). Who decides what experiments social scientists get to run on 1/7th of the world's population?
  - akerl_ 12y ago
    They only make the site better for you if you're on the "winning" side. If A/B tests made the site better for everyone being tested, they'd not be very useful. Unless you mean "they should make your website better for me [after the test is done]", in which case they have the same goal as Facebook's study.

cwal37 12y ago

Universities and think tanks have internal review boards for a reason. The fact that Facebook can make use of its users' data in other (business-related) avenues does not excuse them from the most basic of research ethics. It did pass the muster of Cornell's review board, but that was after the data was actually collected, which amounts to ex post facto approval.

gammarator 12y ago

When addressing criticism, it's not great to start "Ok so." (Or "Calm Down. Breathe. We Hear You" [1], to dig farther back in time.) [1] http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/calm-down-breathe-we-hear-you/2208197130 http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/calm-down-breathe-we-...

baddox 12y ago
Do you have any thoughts about the explanation itself? I made it past the first two words, and thought the explanation was fairly reasonable and satisfying.
- gammarator 12y ago
  The last paragraph does not give me warm feelings about Facebook's internal controls on this kind of research: "While we’ve always considered what research we do carefully, we (not just me, several other researchers at Facebook) have been working on improving our internal review practices. The experiment in question was run in early 2012, and we have come a long way since then."

smokeyj 12y ago

> The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product. That.. or getting users to click more ads. Maybe ad inventory can be optimized for people in an certain emotional state, and the user's wall can be used to induce the most profitable state of mind for fb's available ad inventory. That would be awesome in an evil villain kind of way.

baddox 12y ago
> That.. or getting users to click more ads. Or both, with no contradictions at all.
- smokeyj 12y ago
  The omission of truth is more disingenuous than contradictory.

onewaystreet 12y ago

People calling this unethical have to explain why it is but A/B testing is not.

baddox 12y ago
Not even just A/B testing. Any form of interaction which is intended to alter the mood or beliefs of any person, including visual design, advertising, marketing, etc.
- dublinben 12y ago
  >advertising, marketing, etc. I have no problem claiming that this is usually unethical.
  - baddox 12y ago
    I strongly disagree, but fair enough, if you're consistent. I'm curious, what is your ethical reasoning behind that? Do you oppose markets, or just communication from producers to consumers in markets?
    - sooheon 12y ago
      The active pursuit of more effective means of psychological manipulation seems to be the reason most people have a beef with marketing. Marketing is never about fully honest, fact based "communication from producers to consumers." Distortion, concealment, and need-creation is more marketing's forte. Marketers don't say: "this is our product, buy it if you need it." They say: "here is why you want to buy our product."
napsterbr 12y ago
A/B testing is for commercial purposes, it's wildly different when you are testing the user's psychological state.
- yazinsai 12y ago

zaroth 12y ago

It seems to be that Facebook did something like an A/B test of their ranking algorithm, and then did a cohort study to see if there were any longer term impact. If what they did requires informed consent, what about when the end goal is maximizing click through rate, e.g. by inciting an emotional response? Let's say FB finds that certain types of posts in the feed cause a nearby ad to be clicked on more. They determine this through pervasive testing of everything that you see and do on their site. They could then adjust their algorithm to account for this behavior to increase clicks/profit. I think the actions FB takes to monetize the user base are not only more intrusive by far, they are actively searching for and exploiting these effects for profit. If informed consent for TFA is not ridiculous, then I think we have much bigger problems on our hands? What am I missing about the informed consent issue?

kevingadd 12y ago
You're not missing anything. Informed consent is important for many things currently classified as A/B tests and it isn't currently acquired by anyone. There are many existing products that rely on A/B tests to identify the best way to psychologically manipulate (if not addict) their customers (F2P games, online gambling, etc.)

yazinsai 12y ago

This comment on the piece aptly sums up my response, it's by Sean Tucker: Adam, I don't know you -- I came here from the Buzzfeed article criticizing the ethics of the study that linked to this post, but it appears we do have a friend in common. I just have to ask - you honestly had a hypothesis that amounted to 'perhaps we can make people more depressed,' and decided to test it on a group that hadn't consented to the experiment, with no way to track its impact on their actual lives, only on the language they used in their Facebook posts? And you ask us to trust that this passed an internal review so it's ethical? Please take a moment to step back and consider that. That appears to have been the train of thought that led to this. That's appalling. Completely appalling. The Atlantic piece is right -- there's absolutely no way this passes APA deceptive research standards. Beyond that, you'll never know what impact this actually had on depressed people. You can only measure what they posted to Facebook, which isn't a particularly meaningful or realistic indicator of their emotional state. If this passed an internal review board, that's only proof that Facebook's internal review standards aren't what they need to be. You're in a position of extraordinary power, with access to more subscribers than any other field study in history, a larger population than most nations, and subject only to how you review yourselves. You could deceive yourself into believing you have informed consent because everyone clicked 'accept' on the Terms of Service years ago, but there's no way even you think that's a meaningful standard. I trust you're a reasonable person who doesn't set out to cross ethical boundaries. But on this one, I think Facebook needs to admit it did and make some changes. This study was unethical by any reasonable standard. There's nothing wrong with admitting that and figuring out a way to do better. There's a lot wrong with going ahead with anything like this, ever again.

zaroth 12y ago
This is Facebook. Is has a tremendous effect on peoples lives. And that's precisely why it's worth $100B. This is nothing more than a tweak in their ranking algorithm -- much larger and even targeted/dynamic modifications occur all the time. How can a reasonable person be upset by this? If the study is unethical by any reasonable standard, does this amount to condemning the whole company, even the whole industry? Because if this is unethical, you are calling out an extremely widespread practice...

brainsareneat 12y ago

I wonder where the line is between A/B testing and 'psychological experimentation' and when it's been crossed. Was it crossed just because it was published in PNAS? The outraged don't seem to think so. What if I'm Amazon or Yelp, and I want to choose review snippets? Is looking for emotionally charged ones and testing to see how that impacts users wrong? What if it's more direct psychological manipulation? What if I run a productivity app, and I want to see how giving people encouraging tips, like 'Try starting the day by doing one thing really well.' impacts their item completion rate. I'm doing psychological experimentation. I'm not getting my users' permission. But I am helping them. And it's a valid question - maybe these helpful tips actually end up hurting users. I should test this behavior, not just implement it wholesale. It seems like Facebook had a valid question, and they didn't know what the answer was. Did they go wrong when they published it in PNAS? Or was it wrong to implement the algorithm in the first place? I don't think it was.

kevingadd 12y ago
The main indications that a line was crossed are the combination of a blatantly questionable hypothesis ('we can make people depressed or unhappy') with an intentional lack of informed consent & a huge set of test subjects. If you're doing medical testing in order to roll something out as a pharmaceutical for prescription use or over-the-counter sales, the tests are rolled out in stages, with initial testing being done on a very small number of patients under extreme scrutiny, and even that is only done after the medication has been vetted carefully using animal models. It's extremely important to avoid harming your test subjects. In comparison, they basically went full-steam on this experiment on hundreds of thousands of people despite the fact that emotional manipulation of this sort is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. When I say extremely dangerous I mean potentially life-threatening.

akerl_ 12y ago

Based on the other comments, it appears that the difference between kosher A/B testing and unethical experimentation with dire mental health consequences is either "Did you publish a paper when you were done" or "Are you a big, noteworthy company".

elpool2 12y ago
I'd say that (based on comments here) the real different is intent. People seem to be suggesting that the exact same experiment, but measuring ad-clicks instead of emotional state, would be a perfectly fine A/B test. It doesn't matter that the experiment manipulated people's emotions, it matters that Facebook wanted to manipulate people's emotions.

gouggoug 12y ago

For those like me who lived under a rock, here's the study: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/05/29/1320040111 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/05/29/1320040111

toufka 12y ago
In their summary there's a pretty massive gap in their lack of obtaining informed consent and how dangerous that might be: "Significance: We show, via a massive (N=689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues."

potatolicious 12y ago

I'm going to try and avoid the minefield that is this research vs. ethics. One thought I've had is that the blowback against this incident is less about the research itself and how ethical it is, and more about perception of Facebook in general. My suspicion is a lot of the opposition at this point comes from long-simmering distrust of Facebook and the increasingly negative perception of its brand - this incident is merely the straw that broke the camel's back, for some. And if the popular response to this revelation reflects people's general views on Facebook, it's not good for the company.

polarix 12y ago
It's also, unfortunately, deeply harmful to humanity. http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2014/06/28/in-defense-of-facebook/ http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2014/06/28/in-defense-of-face... > by far the most likely outcome of the backlash Facebook is currently experience is that, in future, its leadership will be less likely to allow its data scientists to publish their findings in the scientific literature
mercer 12y ago
I'm still surprised to discover how many of my friends and acquaintances have a negative view of facebook. Many of them are not very critical of things (and care little about their privacy, for example). The sentiment is generally something like 'I use facebook because it is too inconvenient not to, but I don't like it', which is a far cry from the initial 'facebook is this cool new thing that I wish more of my friends would use instead of <insert usually shitty local social network>'. In that light it makes sense for facebook to acquire up-and-coming business that compete with them, directly or indirectly, and I imagine there are quite a few people at the company who worry about this situation. And in that light it is especially strange for facebook to release a study like this. What did they think would happen? There have been quite a few instances over the past months (or years) that really made me wonder whether facebook's biggest problem, as a company, is that they're stuck in a bubble. A newsfeed that seems to be made for specific types of users, privacy kerfuffles, apps that don't seem to take off, and so on. 'Dogfooding' is generally a smart approach, but it doesn't seem like the optimal approach when your product relies on the whole world for its success...

r0h1n 12y ago

Wow, what an amazingly tone-deaf post. It demeans Facebook users who were offended at the company's actions into simpletons who did not really understand what the study was really about. Sample this: > Nobody's posts were "hidden," they just didn't show up on some loads of Feed. How is hiding any different from not showing up? > And at the end of the day, the actual impact on people in the experiment was the minimal amount to statistically detect it. Not what your own study claimed. > I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. We are not sorry about the research, but only for "the way the paper described it". > In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety. In hindsight, our users are hyperventilating frogs. They should learn how to relax in the nice warm(ing) Facebook waters.

deleted 12y ago
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zaroth 12y ago
I am really trying to understand both sides of this. Focusing on the actual research, what about it do you think requires informed consent? Do you understand how widespread this kind of research is? Literally everyone does this. The act of publishing can't be the ethical breach -- just focus on the research, what do you think they did wrong there?
- jamesbrownuhh 12y ago
  Perhaps it could be summed up as "Attempting to negatively influence a visitor's mental state without their knowledge or consent IS NOT COOL."
  - onewaystreet 12y ago
    So much advertising could be said to negatively influence a person's mental state. These are not simple questions with simple answers.

OrwellianChild 12y ago

Am I alone in being completely un-surprised and accepting of Facebook doing research in this way on its users? The News Feed as an interface for using FB is and has always been an evolving product and in the control of FB. They've been constantly messing with it, A/B testing different combinations of user/advertiser content and post/comment structure. They do this to test outcomes, and achieve goals that most likely include (and are certainly not limited to): - Optimizing ad targeting - Maximizing click-thru - Maximizing engagement - Minimizing abandonment/bounce rates The News Feed already doesn't show you all your friends' posts and hasn't for quite some time. How they choose to "curate" what they do show is going to be dictated by their incentives/needs. Getting outraged about any of this seems akin to getting pissed that the new season of your favorite TV show sucked... Edited for formatting...

kevingadd 12y ago
You're not alone, but I think you do yourself a disservice by underestimating the potential negative impact of an experiment designed for the purpose of manipulating a customer's emotions. There's no defensible business objective here, and furthermore, any business objective that relies on this kind of emotional manipulation is suspect. Intentionally making a customer depressed is not something you fuck around with. It's incredibly dangerous, and doing it to a huge subset of your audience with no mechanisms to ensure you don't inflict real harm is utterly reckless and irresponsible. The individual mechanisms and approach used here for the experiment are not, in and of themselves, objectionable. Many A/B tests are wholly defensible. The end goal and process are the problem here.
- amirmc 12y ago
  > "... any business objective that relies on this kind of emotional manipulation is suspect." So all modern day advertising then, that attempts to create a connection with the viewer/reader (as opposed to presenting bare facts). I agree that there was a process problem from the point of view of a research study but had this just been an A/B test for engagement levels, we might never have known what Facebook did.

alx 12y ago

Does someone remember the name of the NSA program concerning psychological manipulation on social networks ?

alx 12y ago
GCHQ, NSA ‘infiltrate’ social media to spread disinformation, with slide concerning psychology aspect of social network, including facebook : http://inserbia.info/today/2014/04/gchq-nsa-infiltrate-social-media-to-spread-disinformation-and-propaganda-report/ http://inserbia.info/today/2014/04/gchq-nsa-infiltrate-socia... The Intercept article concerning JTRIG actions on social networks : https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/ https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula... This study would fit pretty well in documenting possible manipulations.

natural219 12y ago

For posterity's sake, I want to clarify what is going on here. What's been happening, over the last five years, is that American society has become more trigger-happy in deducing "accurate" moral conclusions from following online media outlets. I outlined some of this in cjohnson.io/2014/context, although I didn't appreciate the full power of this conclusion at the time, and so the essay mostly falls short to explain the entirety of what's happening currently. In a nutshell: The Web has broken down barriers between contexts that used to live in harmony, ignorant of each other. Now, as the incompatibility of these contexts come into full focus, society has no choice but to accept the fluidity of context in the information age, or tear itself apart at the seams. All that was needed to precipitate the decline of Facebook (oh yes, Facebook is going down, short now while supplies last) was some combination of words and contexts that fully elucidate the power of online advertising / data aggregation to have real impact upon people's lives. Put in terms that the "average person" can understand, the impact of this story will be devastating. I feel so bad for the Facebook PR team -- they're simply out of their league here. The reason this scandal will be the one we read about in the history books is because it provides the chain link between two separate, but very powerful contexts: 1, the context of Nazi-esque social experimentation, and 2, the run-of-the-mill SaaS-style marketing that has come to characterize, well, pretty much every large startup in the valley. We've reached a point where nobody knows what is going to happen next. Best of luck, people.

xenadu02 12y ago

Simple fix: "We're conducting a scientific study on mood for the next three months. Would you mind participating? The study won't require you to do anything special or take any further action. Y/N?" There we go kids, easy as pie; it's called consent to participate! Pretty easy to do without spilling the beans on the study.

chris_wot 12y ago
This is a wider issue, but how do they prevent knowledge of the experiment adversely affecting the results?