What Happened?
Researchers from Cornell University and the University of California collaborated with Facebook and devised an psychological experiment wherein news feed of more than 6.5 lakh users were specially tweaked.These users, who unwittingly became part of this experiment, were forced to see positive and negative posts based on the experiment.
Some of these users’ newsfeed on Facebook only showed positive posts and the rest of the user’s newsfeed only showed negative posts.
Termed as an ‘emotional experiment’, the scientists then recorded the response of these users based on the positive or negative newsfeed. After evaluating the results and responses, the study was published in the journal called “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA”, and as per the published journal, “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.”
Hardly any surprises over here as the human mind will react and respond accordingly, based on the positive or negative news from their friends and family.
What is the fuss?
Privacy advocates, social media experts and lawyers are demanding to know that why Facebook conducted such an emotional and psychological experiment without informing 6 lakh+ users, and how far is this allowed as per the law.At a time when Facebook has 1 billion+ users, with a wealth of private information about everyone, is it ethical to conduct such ‘social experiment’ on unaware users?
Politicians in UK have demanded a judicial enquiry into this experiment done by Facebook in manipulating user’s newsfeed as one of the parliamentary member quoted, “This is extraordinarily powerful stuff and if there is not already legislation on this, then there should be to protect people..”
Read more: http://trak.in/tags/business/2014/06/30/facebook-mental-research-depressing-posts/
0 comments:
Post a Comment