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"Emotional Contagion" and The Mood-Altering Powers of Facebook...
Other | Thursday 9th October 2014 | Osh
Facebook could be facing investigation in the UK for a contentious 2012 'study' that attempted to analyse its users' emotional states.
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) is to question Facebook about the experiment that consisted of the news feeds of around 700,000 users being manipulated, possibily constituting a breach of data privacy laws. Jim Sheridan, a member of the Commons media select committee has called the experiment "extraordinarily powerful stuff", adding that "if there isn't already legislation on this, then there should be, to protect people."
Facebook secretly altered the content feeds of users, giving a measured amount of sad news and happier news in an attempt at better understanding what they call "emotional contagion". This was accomplished by strategically placing positive or negative posts in users' feeds to gage how this would affect their mood. The key fact is that they did this without their users' consent or knowledge.
When the information was made public in June, it sparked anger online and raised questions about the ethics of the study (which lasted about a week). It forced the world's most used social-networking site on to the back foot and needing to justify its actions. A scientific journal published the controversial Facebook 'mood manipulation' experiment in July and stated its concern that Facebook did not follow established scientific principles (and ethics) of informed consent.
The experiment raises old concerns over the mood-altering capabalities of social media in general and of Facebook in particular, which has approximately 1.2 billion members. Critics say research conducted on people is normally governed by stricter ethical regulations. Strictly speaking, Facebook's secretive experiment did not constitute any breach of its terms of usage/service, though it is regarded as unethical on account of the fact that users were not notified about what was being done.
The subsequent controversy that arose once the results were published resulted in an apology from the social network's Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who told a business seminar in July that the experiment was part of the organisation's "product testing" processes. She admitted, however, that the whole thing had been "communicated terribly" and she issued an apology for it.
So was anything learnt from this secretive study? The results are said to have indicated that "emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks," according to the researchers. It is suggested that people who were shown more negative posts or comments posted more negative comments themselves, while being exposed to positive posts resulted in more positive comments.
In a blog post last week, Facebook's Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer announced that future "social science research" would be regulated by better guidelines. "It is clear now that there are things we should have done differently," he admitted. The social network giant also said that it is making better research practices part of its basic training program for its employees with six-week training boot-camps.
At the basic level, Facebook provides a platform for broad social interaction and instant connection. The research, however, suggests that the platform has the potential to undermine the emotional well-being of its users rather than to necessarily enhance it, leaving users susceptible to mood fluctuations over the course of a day. Interestingly the research doesn't specify that over-use of Facebook or more long-term use of the site is any better or worse than short-term exposure, but one imagines it is implied.
