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Comment by tathougies | Hacker News Reader

This is insanity. How did this study pass an ethics council? They admit to exposing people to negative emotional cues at random?

Their N is 689K. At this point, they are certainly responsible for some number of suicides.

The authors should be ashamed of themselves. Their salary is being paid by manipulating people's emotions on purpose. Something is wrong with that.

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Unless I am mistaken, this study reports on Facebook’s own test of News Feed algorithms. Facebook ran the test in 2012, supposedly to determine whether posts with emotional content are more engaging. This study (published in 2014, by the way—could someone edit the title?) appears to be examining the data from that test.

FWIW there was some backlash at the time: https://www.wsj.com/articles/furor-erupts-over-facebook-expe...

There is a link to the answer right on the page under "Editorial Expression of Concern". This answers how it bypassed an ethics council: https://www.pnas.org/content/111/29/10779.1

>They admit to exposing people to negative emotional cues at random?

I'm not sure the "negative" part matters. Manipulating someone's information in any way is irresponsible. A message intended to be uplifting can be harmful, say if someone is in a manic state or is unable to relate to the positive message. In politics, I think we all know the dangers of burying bad news.

Making people sad is more obviously evil than making people happy, but Facebook has no business trying to do either.

>At this point, they are certainly responsible for some number of suicides.

I doubt that. The effect size was small (~2% change in frequency of emotional words), and it seems dubious to me that the frequency of positive and negative words actually reflects someone's emotional state.

But failure isn't an excuse. Trying to hurt people isn't OK just because you aren't very good at it.

> Manipulating someone's information in any way is irresponsible.

I agree. But what about advertising, filter bubbles, curated feeds, aggregators? Is it OK if done algorithmically to make more money?

It didn't.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/0...

The issue is that they published it in a journal? Otherwise an ethics board isnt required for running an A/B test

Seems like there are several concerns: the journal, a question of whether the FB usage agreement permitted such a report from being published, and generally whether it is ethical (separate from the review board question). Some more discussion:

http://ulan.mede.uic.edu/alansz/2014/07/an-open-letter-to-pn...

The ethical question is whether to do A/B tests privately vs to do A/B tests and publish scientific papers about them.

I would be interested to understand the ethical basis for removing the ability of companies to run A/B tests.

And further, whether to do A/B tests or not, and whether the subject consents, since the test might have negative effect

How should a user consent to a Google A/B test other than agreeing to use the software that has A/B tests in it? They run 10s of thousands of tests every day

I think that the vast majority of A/B tests are unethical.

Sorry but you can't hold someone else responsible for suicide unless they were specifically taunting and influencing someone to commit that act.

But they were specifically taunting them and influencing them. They put up posts with negative emotions. If just one post caused someone to commit suicide in the negative study group, and facebook showed it to them one time more than normal, they are culpable. Given the large N value, I find it difficult to believe this didn't happen.

Negative emotions is already a significant chunk of social media in general and news media as well. So...very slippery slope definition for culpability you've got there.

That's why social media feeds must use a dumb algorithm.

"Normal" is already determined by their AB testing which is already massive scale human experimentation.

I wonder at what point people will be able to say "It's not my fault, the Algorithm made me do it" and have that accepted as a valid excuse by a majority of society.

Isn't that just the generalisation of 'it is only business' which the majority of society already accepts as a valid excuse for some pretty unethical behaviour.

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