'our' permission, and subscribers around the world are not happy about this! What is now raising eyebrows is a recent publication of a study for which the company manipulated the News Feeds of nearly 700,000 subscribers.
The study concluded that negative messages on social networks make people sad, and positive ones make them happy. Facebook also discovered that those feelings can spread through a social network to third parties.
But how exactly does one measure 'feelings?' International media gathered that'Nearly 690,000 subscribers to the English-language version of the social network were selected randomly as guinea pigs without their knowledge, and divided into two groups. One group had some negative posts omitted from their News Feeds, while the other had some positive posts cut out.'
The experiments were conducted between January 11 and 18 in 2012.
Led by Adam Kramer of Facebook's Core Data Science team, which was heavily involved in the research, the study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, or PNAS.
The researchers, in response to the outcry, which in turn have been criticized as being dismissive of the issues raised.The experiment "manipulated the extent to which people were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed," the published paper statescontended that no text was seen by the researchers and that the project therefore was compliant with Facebook's Data Use Policy, to which all users must agree as a prerequisite to creating a Facebook account. Agreement to the policy constitutes informed consent for the research, they argued.
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