Facebook admits fault in "secret experiment"

So much easier to ask forgiveness than ask permission! They are cowards!
 
BGE said:
So much easier to ask forgiveness than ask permission! They are cowards!
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It wouldn't have been a very good experiment if they'd told everyone about it in the first place.
 
Nick333 said:
It wouldn't have been a very good experiment if they'd told everyone about it in the first place.
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But they could have disclosed it after the experiment, together with the results. Instead, they said nothing at all until the articles were published.
 
Ek doen nie meer die gesig boek ding nie. Het na n jaar besluit dis klomp bollie en aan beweeg
 
So what exactly happened and what are people crying about now again? Did someone perhaps fall victim to theft of personal information voluntarily disclosed on a social network site?
 
Slootvreter said:
So what exactly happened and what are people crying about now again? Did someone perhaps fall victim to theft of personal information voluntarily disclosed on a social network site?
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I'm wondering the same thing. I'm not sure what people are actually upset about.
 
Nick333 said:
I'm wondering the same thing. I'm not sure what people are actually upset about.
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It's an experiment that manipulated people's thoughts and emotions (or studied whether this can be done). In psychology, if you do this sort of experiments on human subjects, there are ethical and legal guidelines to follow. The legal guidelines doesn't apply to Facebook, but it would have if it was a study done by a university. The ethical guidelines was completely ignored by Facebook.
 
Valerion said:
It's an experiment that manipulated people's thoughts and emotions (or studied whether this can be done). In psychology, if you do this sort of experiments on human subjects, there are ethical and legal guidelines to follow. The legal guidelines doesn't apply to Facebook, but it would have if it was a study done by a university. The ethical guidelines was completely ignored by Facebook.
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Facebook altering people's emotions. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
 
Valerion said:
It's an experiment that manipulated people's thoughts and emotions (or studied whether this can be done). In psychology, if you do this sort of experiments on human subjects, there are ethical and legal guidelines to follow. The legal guidelines doesn't apply to Facebook, but it would have if it was a study done by a university. The ethical guidelines was completely ignored by Facebook.
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Actually, I think it was just a study of posts. I don't know that any manipulation took place.
 
Nick333 said:
Actually, I think it was just a study of posts. I don't know that any manipulation took place.
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A social-network furor has erupted over news that Facebook Inc., FB -0.48% in 2012, conducted a massive psychological experiment on nearly 700,000 unwitting users.

To determine whether it could alter the emotional state of its users and prompt them to post either more positive or negative content, the site's data scientists enabled an algorithm, for one week, to automatically omit content that contained words associated with either positive or negative emotions from the central news feeds of 689,003 users.

The research, published in the March issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sparked a different emotion—outrage—among some people who say Facebook toyed with its users emotions and uses members as guinea pigs.
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http://online.wsj.com/articles/furor-erupts-over-facebook-experiment-on-users-1404085840

They changed users' feeds to try and manipulate them, then studied how users reacted to that.
 
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