Ads intentionally make people feel ugly, lazy, stupid, fat, dirty, smelly, dandruffy, lonely and ashamed so they'll buy whatever product is on offer.
Commerce is all about manipulating people for profit. I'm not a Facebook fan, but tell me how this is worse than standard operating procedure with every other consumer product?
When I see an ad, I know that the company wants me to give them my money. When I see my friend post something on Facebook, they want to communicate or connect in some way ... note that it is not a monetary desire to buy something from a friend, but to connect with them on a human and emotional level. Manipulating the news feed so that there is an appearance of more or less contentment among my friends when that is not what they intended for others to see is manipulative. I've always had "most recent" instead of "top stories" so this wouldn't have affected me, but to imply that it's just like an ad is utter horseshit.
Similarly, you should know that everything you see on Facebook is designed to profit from your attention. The choices they make about what ads to show and what to put in your newsfeed are not altruistic. These decisions are about what's best for Facebook, not what's best for you.
If it profits Procter & Gamble or Unilever[0] to show ads that make you feel inferior or anxious, that's what they'll do.
And if Facebook can make you feel lonely or sad so you'll spend more time on Facebook and see more ads, that's what they'll do too.
> to imply that it's just like an ad is utter horseshit
I'm not seeing a big distinction.
[0] http://www.vocativ.com/world/india/indias-5-worst-ads-skin-w...
A sign on a freeway incidating that a certain restaurant is 1 mile ahead probably wouldn't upset many people, but an advertisement for a mobile game might. Both are blatant attempts to manipulate people.
Companies rigorously test and refine ads to manipulate emotions and behavior on a scale two or three orders of magnitude greater than Facebook's experiment.
Is Facebook's experiment different because they published the results in an academic journal?
Ad companies run experiments on us all the time. When they A/B test across different groups of consumers to see the effectiveness of an ad, they are running a psychological experiment on us without our consent (asking, "how will exposure to this ad affect a person's likelihood of buying our product?").
I think the rules that you're referring to are for federally funded research only. But there's a large body of commercial research that is constantly experimenting on us without our consent.
You should be at least as much worried about "manipulating human behavior for profit" as you are about "manipulating human behavior in order to publish the most effective ways of doing so"; otherwise, you're just letting yourself get tripped up by the labels.
If the newsfeed accidentally did a poor job of this (and mine often does), we could accuse facebook of being incompetent (or less than perfectly competent).
If, however, newsfeed intentionally did a poor job of this, and purposely showed us things specifically designed to make us sad, that's gone beyond "less than competent". That's "actively malicious".
THAT is the reason people are getting upset. Or at least it would be if they understood how facebook works.
I think Randall has a fair point here. FB has essentially been doing this for years and something about their latest test got all our panties in a bunch. Its clear though now, FB never had to adhere to any sort of standards for their website.
And yet that seems a lot more dangerous than this study...
Facebook is not about communication between you and Facebook, but between you and other users. Facebook is effectively manipulating communication and the relationship you have with your friends on the website.
The manipulation of the feed is subject to the intent of the manipulation. If the goal is to make sure that you see things you want to do anyways (posts by friends you interact with often, for example), then that seems reasonable. Here the manipulation is not to make the user's experience better.
I guess you could chalk some of that up to incompetence, but most of it to apathy.
[0] http://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
[1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/262206/make_your_facebook_new...
Here's my TLDR... If this research enables Facebook to curate people's feeds to make them happier, would we consider the cost acceptable? Does Facebook even have the right to do so? Is it ethical to hide your friend's serious post or cry for help and show you cat pics, even if that will make you happier in the short run? Separately, Danah talks about how the media's hypocritical outrage over this is likely going to lead to Facebook and other companies still doing a bunch of unethical things to increase their revenues, but just becoming more secretive about it.
Seriously, read the article. Don't stop with my inadequate tldr.
