Facebook Responds to Criticism of its Experiment on Users

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Facebook is unapologetic about the “emotional contagion” experiment it was conducting on customers.

Reports about the ethics of it (see The Atlantic) have been kicking up emotion and it was getting contagious.

Here’s what happened. For a research project and ultimately a paper, researchers at Facebook tweaked what hundreds of thousans of users saw in their news feeds, skewing the content to be more positive or negative than normal. Then they checked users’ status updates to see if the content affected what they wrote. They found that, yes, Facebook users’ moods are affected by what they see in their news feeds. Users who saw more negative posts would write more negative things on their own walls, and likewise for positive posts.

Source: Washington Post

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