Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be the final straw (2012)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Product Person #2: Not sure, wouldn’t negative posts make people feel worse?
Product Person #1: Wow, I donno, maybe we should try adjusting additional posts people see one way a bit and see what happens?
Product Person #2: Not a bad idea, how about we try both? You know, an A/B test.
Product Person #1: Hmmm. Ok, but— when we’re done, let’s have some scientific review of our data just so that we can correct the record and push along the science around this stuff.
Journalist: This company deliberately made people sad
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf
Edit: And it is in their public defense of this paper that they think we all gave 'informed consent' to this kind of psychological manipulation when we signed up for Facebook because it's in the TOS.
They literally define 'informed consent' as the legal text in their TOS. I mean that's insane, they know their users don't read that before signing up. It's not f'ing informed or consent ugh this makes me so mad.
Also what kind of sick company puts into their TOS that they can emotionally manipulate you on purpose whenever they want? Fucked up.
That said, anyone who signs up for a job at Facebook doesn't give a shit about ethical design of experiments.
The alternative is relying on intuition only and possibly making people permanently sadder. Or is there a way to achieve this knowledge consistent with the field of research ethics?
We saw this with challenge trials in the pandemic where ethicists fretted people would reject them and concluded challenge trials are immoral. Meanwhile opinion polls suggest people view challenge trials as virtuous and the current method of waiting for infections as immoral.
The real evil isn’t in the experiment, it’s that the researchers found that Facebook makes people’s lives worse. How many suicides are caused by Facebook’s investors? Whether they can mitigate it this way or that is splitting hairs.
NO, companies should not perform secret psychological experiments on people without their consent because they "could suggest how to avoid sadness."
> challenge trials in the pandemic
You mean the ones people consented to? Why is consent not an issue for you?
If their current process was already suspected to be the worse of the two, and their goal was to improve peoples' moods per se, what is the ethical thing to do? Keep people feeling more sad?
Or, perhaps, stop being algorithmic in what people see, or else put people in full control of simple sorting (prioritize my "starred" category and sort by date)?
There was a specific task force at Facebook intended to better understand customer psychology. Came from them.
This is similar to claiming that traffic experiments which change the flow of cars, in term causing some people to experience more traffic and become unhappy, are unethical. Do you think traffic experiments are unethical?
There is a massive difference in studying and directing traffic to help make traffic flow better. The goal there is to improve driving for everyone. Facebook's goal is to intentionally make people unhappy for the sole purpose of making more money.
Facebook definitely caused the emotions - by deliberately choosing to show particular content.
> This is similar to claiming that traffic experiments which change the flow of cars, in term causing some people to experience more traffic and become unhappy, are unethical. Do you think traffic experiments are unethical?
If the objective of the traffic experiment had been to deliberately get a certain group of cars stuck in a traffic jam, this would absolutely be unethical.
A closer analogue would be a traffic experiment designed to gauge the emotional effects of a particular route. That's an important difference.
The article itself says the experiment was designed to look for evidence of emotional contagion, which is quite different from "it was designed to make people sad".
Also, in another thread it's pointed out that the effect sizes from this study were extremely small - something like 0.3% more negative words were used by ~150k people. The effect is said to be on the same scale as any minor UI change, like a size/color change of the "like" button. So it's hard to see this as anything other than folks looking for a reason to get outraged.
That was their research goal, yes. Their methodology was this:
> For some, that meant 90% of all "positive" posts were removed from their newsfeed for a week, rendering the social network a pit of despair.
Research can be unethical even if the intention of the research is not.
For the traffic analogy, if part of that traffic experiment would involve a routing change that researchers know will likely cause a traffic jam, then the experiment will be unethical, no matter how warranted the research may be.
That's the reason you cannot use placebos to test life-saving medication (without prior informed consent), even though it would certainly be beneficial for science if you could.
And in Facebook's case, their research goal wasn't even that ethical in the first place. Maye we can have this talk if they try to find a cure for depression through emotional manipulation, but this was literally just about preventing people from leaving Facebook:
> "At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends' negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook."
Protection of clinical trial subjects
Clinical trials on minors
Clinical trials on incapacitated adults not able to give informed legal
Establishment of mandatory Ethics Committees
When you have an improved algorithm, would you change your algorithm all at once for everybody, or would you test your change on small % of users, before you go full-scale? You'd do the latter. There's no better option. Because if you're wrong, your impact is much more devastating.
In other words, there's always an algorithm filtering your feed. If that was unethical, it makes Facebook unethical by merely existing.
This is not a "public service" - it's a for-profit company.
> When you have an improved algorithm,
This is not an "improved algorithm". They deliberately removed almost all positive news from some people's feeds for a week.
Which would be correct, surely?
If this is the hypothesis they are testing for, the problem is they subjected people to a psychological experiment without consenting to it, for the ultimate purpose of their own financial gain.
How is that not malicious intent?
I don't think facebook engineers or data scientists care what people feel when they're adjusting their models, they only care about time spent on their platform or some other overly reductionist metric. One could argue that chasing super-efficiency will always result in abominations, but I think its hard to say that someone is doing something imoral by just doing the human equivalent of gradient descent in the optimization problem of driving engagement. That's not to say that we shouldn't have a conversation about this and not figure out ways to make these super efficient and powerful companies find ways to be satisfied with organic engagement.
What if an almost-suicidal person got the "b" version?
A/B testing should be used when you think, in good faith, that BOTH "a" and "b" versions could be good and want to know which one works better, not to confirm a hypothesis that "b" has a negative impact on users' personal lives.
A/B tests for the case where you honestly, in good faith, think both A or B could be good designs, but you don't know which one is better.
A/B testing is for product design changes, not psychology experiments. It is NOT for the primary intention of a psychology experiment with a group of subjects that didn't consent to a study, where either A or B has a suspected negative impact on emotions, and you're using A/B testing to confirm or deny that hypothesis.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...
I did read the whole article, and that doesn't excuse the BS clickbait title of "Facebook deliberately made people sad."
I find the fact that the article is complaining about emotional manipulation by Facebook, while using a deliberately manipulative title, to be more than a tad ironic.
> "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""
Further, the article you link appears to have commentary by a single researcher.
Here’s a writeup by researcher who thinks it wasn’t unethical at all and that it would have passed IRB as performed. It, of course, does not end the discussion, but it does demonstrate that the issue is more complex than a company deliberately making people sad:
https://hbr.org/2014/07/were-okcupids-and-facebooks-experime...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/media-values-...
And "the journalist is relaying" is a poor excuse - the journalist has a choice of what to relay and how to frame it, and this choice is routinely used to frame things in a specific way. There's no "just reporting" anymore, if there ever was. There's always a reason why something is reported (or not reported, as it happens) and there's always a reason why something is reported in a specific way. The choice and control is always on the press's side.
> This Facebook study was conducted without consent and without appropriate oversight, and may have harmed both participants and non-participants. Kramer’s apology also puts the vast number of participants in context; a full 0.04% of Facebook’s users, or 1 in 2500, were unwitting subjects in this unethical research. Many of these people were almost certainly children, and many of the participants were probably suffering from depression. It is surprising and worrying that one of the world’s most prominent companies should treat both the emotions of its users and research ethics so carelessly. Steps must be taken to ensure that international psychological and medical studies involving social network users are regulated to the same standard as other human subjects research.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1747016115579535
Edit: Also you said something that confused me,
> given they are only analyzing data they already gather?
I'm not sure what this means. But they did not only analyze existing data, they created new data specifically intended to make people feel sad, then analyzed that data.
Other sources list a couple of principles behind the ethics of psychological research. The relevant ones being:
- Minimise the risk of harm - Obtain informed consent
Some of them do state that the latter isn't always exactly possible, since that may influence the outcome.
But the fact of the matter is that Facebook did an A/B test that could inflect serious harm on the quality of life of the participants, who weren't aware of any research being conducted. The latter sounds like it'd be at least the minimum here.
So, I'm not a psychologist, but this does sound like it shouldn't have happened in this way. There were definitely more ethical ways in running this experiment that wouldn't have involved 700K unknowing and potentially unwilling participants.
By the way, the whole "intelligent" newsfeed is likely not expected either. My guess is, most people sign up to Facebook with the expectation to see the update of all their friends, nit be subject to Facebook's AI games and product research.
Emotional manipulation is also clearly not in the user's self interest, so there is no reason why they ever should give consent. (As opposed to an AI newsfeed, which could be a useful feature if it worked in the user's interest)
Why is that automatically the case and how would the user know that?
> So again, consent is already provided for the possibility of emotional manipulation.
Giving consent for one specific form of emotional manipulation does not give blanket consent to all forms - especially not to deliberate acts.
Using the same logic, a surgeon could argue:
This patient asks me to fix his broken leg. To do this, I have to operate on him and create an incision. An incision is an instance of causing bodily harm. Therefore, the patient has given consent for me to cause him bodily harm. Therefore, I now have consent to punch the patient's face and steal his kidneys.
See the problem?
> What's the difference between accidental and scientifically valid emotional manipulation such that extra consent is needed?
One is accidental, the other is deliberate.
Also, that's not just my opinion. Just read the other guardian article linked from this one and the statements linked there:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...
http://laboratorium.net/archive/2014/06/28/as_flies_to_wanto...
Of course it is automatically the case. If a post can have emotional valence, but emotional valence isn't controlled for, then occasionally some sequence of posts will be more negative than average just by chance. This is accidental emotional manipulation.
>Giving consent for one specific form of emotional manipulation does not give blanket consent to all forms - especially not to deliberate acts.
But it's not all forms, its a specific type of maniupation: posts in your feed with more or less than average positive or negative emotional valence. This is just a consequence of having a feed at all.
>One is accidental, the other is deliberate.
You have a knack for restating the facts of the case and then (figuratively) going QED. It's a little frustrating. Again, why does intentional manipulation require more consent than accidental manipulation when the process by which it happens (alterations to the feed) already has blanket consent?
>Also, that's not just my opinion. Just read the other guardian article linked from this one and the statements linked there:
I'm not interested in more opinions, I'm interested in arguments.
EDIT: One of your own links references a post that details the circumstances in which the "informed consent" requirement can be waived:
"According to Prof. Fiske’s now-uncertain report of her conversation with the authors, by contrast, the local IRB approved the study “on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people’s News Feeds all the time.” This fact actually is relevant to a proper application of the Common Rule to the study.
Here’s how. Section 46.116(d) of the regulations provides:
An IRB may approve a consent procedure which does not include, or which alters, some or all of the elements of informed consent set forth in this section, or waive the requirements to obtain informed consent provided the IRB finds and documents that:
The research involves no more than minimal risk to the subjects;
The waiver or alteration will not adversely affect the rights and welfare of the subjects;
The research could not practicably be carried out without the waiver or alteration; and
Whenever appropriate, the subjects will be provided with additional pertinent information after participation.
The Common Rule defines “minimal risk” to mean “that the probability and magnitude of harm or discomfort anticipated in the research are not greater in and of themselves than those ordinarily encountered in daily life . . . .” The IRB might plausibly have decided that since the subjects’ environments, like those of all Facebook users, are constantly being manipulated by Facebook, the study’s risks were no greater than what the subjects experience in daily life as regular Facebook users, and so the study posed no more than “minimal risk” to them."
More discussion on: https://www.thefacultylounge.org/2014/06/how-an-irb-could-ha...
Facebook didn't make people sad. It made a population post things with slightly more negative words, only significant when measured across hundreds of thousands of users.
This was an unauthorized, unguided, unethical, mass psychological experiment on human beings. Anyone involved should have gone to jail for crimes against humanity.
It's a much more complicated issue then you describe. Many corporate organizations have been selectively distributing information to deliberately influence sentiment for decades. Facebook is not the first nor will they be the last.
Restricting any entity from doing this is a complicated issue that has to do with restricting freedom of speech.
Fox news comes to mind when I think of another organization that does this deliberately. To add more complication to the issue one should consider the fact that the success of Fox news can also be attributed to it's customers: people. People choose what they want to hear, and many people prefer news viewed through a biased right leaning lens.
Just like how the above poster wants to paint this issue as a crime against humanity, I think part of the problem is that on some level we all want to lie to ourselves. We want to view the world in a very specific and certain black and white way.
Like I said, not so clear cut. It's a complex world we live in. But I get why someone would vote me down. It's easier to see everything in terms of black and white. The truth, however, is grey.
Take freedom of religion for example. Freedom of religion allows cults like Scientology to form. If we allow the government to have the power to eliminate Scientology what kind of power does it give the government over Christianity or Buddhism?
Personally my view is that the cost is worth the benefit, because the alternative is much worse.
Like for example?
> Personally my view is that the cost is worth the benefit, because the alternative is much worse.
A comfortable view if the cost is mainly paid by others.
And you say it’s a cost paid by others? Can you give me an example of how I don’t pay the cost? Right you can’t because you didn’t know that I’m a user of Facebook. Logically it is impossible for you to know whether I “pay” for these costs or not.
Basically without knowing who I am you made up a lie out of thin air. There is no other logic that can explain what you just said as you know nothing about me. Is lying in itself not clandestine manipulation? Are you not lying in attempt to clandestinely manipulate me and others reading this towards your opinion?
You obviously have no skin in the game, you don’t even use Facebook, you’re just harping off about it because you don’t give a shit about freedom of speech at all.
Is the paragraph above true or a manipulative lie? Did lying like that make you angry? What about that garbage lie you made up about me? Is this the same brainless response and fury everyone is reacting to Facebook “experimenting” on us without deeper consideration?
Does me or you being angry about manipulative bullshit give either of us the right to clamp down on our right to say it? Should I have the right to call the police on you for making up shit and lying?
No. And honestly outside of the context of “giving you an example” I suggest you check yourself. The drivel coming out of your mouth is deliberately offensive. “A cost paid by others” is an outright lie made up for the express purpose of manipulation and inciting anger. Emotional manipulation is no less evil then experimental manipulation.
Careful what you do to your own freedom of speech rights... If you succeed, one day your ideas will be muzzling your own manipulative vitriol like a dog.
Perhaps I can call out to dang, have him come over and moderate this thread. No let’s make it so that the government can moderate Facebook, which then in turn means they can moderate you.
What do you think is the justification the CCP gives themselves when they moderate the entire internet in China? It’s the same justification you’ve given me, they seek to moderate clandestine manipulation.
Is that something engineers and data scientists should be imprisoned over? I think most US politicians cause bigger effects every time they tweet.
I for one, do not believe that a bunch of twats in silicon valley give a crap about ethics, do you?
I mean don't get me wrong, I dont like it and try to exclude it from my life and my families life, but there's pretty wide acceptance socially for this type of behaviour.
I would of thought the beauty industry would be an old perpetrator that should generally be investigated. going to shut down that?
and negatively instilling fear and distrust in a population without their consent for personal gain is about as old as politics itself?
isn't this practically mainstream media behaviour?
fomo? status anxiety? conspicuous consumption? I don't see why Facebook should be singled out for society-wide mandated and culturally supported practices.
At the early stages of the internet, most of the content was hidden, waiting for you to actively discover and bookmark it. Like you do with good places in your town - you find one, add it to your address book and visit occasionally. It was a slow process, full of findings, enjoyment and variety. Now everyone seems to sit at their mailbox, desperately waiting for another pack of junk mail to arrive. Facebook is just that - a postman who chooses from a variety of crap to push into your inbox. It doesn’t change lives unless people are too lazy to live by themselves.
Why is it my unhealthy addiction if a multi-billion dollar company uses all tools at their disposal to push me into said addiction?
And you can do that even without Quitting Facebook, just bookmark an url that has no feed in it. Personally I’m not using facebook, but e.g. youtube always tries to push me into viewing something. But I simply do not scroll the feed, and go to subs or search instead when I want something new. Only user’s laziness allows them to take control, and only a user is in control of their laziness. All of those who complain about the modern internet forget that old internet required you to “surf” it very actively. FAANG exists as a multi-trillion industry only because people are inert content junkies with a thumb.
Yes, but that's basic biology, not anything that has to do with strength of character or freedom of choice.
"People" are also into heroine. Should we allow to build a multi-trillion dollar industry on that?
Otoh, if you find out that you’re selling drugs in your cookie shop, should you stop? Because even non-targeting news sites do exactly that in this analogy. They post articles that “everyone” wants to see. Where is a borderline between “free coffee to breakfast” and “heroin store black friday”?
I enjoy cuddling, long walks on the beach, and services that do not run social experiments on me like something out of a cheap movie plot about a mad-scientist.
to contact this user please dial "jancsika" on your rotary phone now
Are "we" actually comfortable with that practice? (And who is "we" in the first place? The general public? Tech people? Journalists?)
It seems to me, this is simply something the industry does because it can get away with it - and most users don't object because they don't even know it's happening.
Why tech journalists see the Facebook thing as objectionable but A/B tests without consent as perfectly fine might be a question worth discussing.
Does anyone actually know people who avidly use and love Facebook? It seems like Facebook is like the Christian church where the church and everyone says they go every Sunday but it’s really more like once a year at this point.
I don't have issues with the study in general. You do want to know whether and how you can influence people in a positive or negative way, especially if you want to avoid it. There's really no other way to find out than to study it. They should've gotten clear consent for participation in that study, but that's about it from my point of view.
In most medical studies, that's not being done. You might give someone placebos and watch what happens when you don't give them the medication you want to test, but you're not giving people cancer to see what helps best.
I'm not sure consent would've made a fundamental difference to that reaction to it.
At the time, I figured it was a psychological trick to suck me into viewing more ads since violence has that "can't look away" nature to it...but now that I think about it, they could have been intentionally stirring up angry emotions within the general population during the election cycle. Anyone else notice this?
Or are people actually selecting specifically upsetting stuff?
It's similar to the process of trending topics on Twitter (and one of the reasons that space is such a garbage fire).
Facebook would make all its users happy and positive if that were possible to do. Nobody at Facebook is trying to manipulate you, except by trying to show you content that keeps you coming back to Facebook.
Except when they’re running psychological experiments to purposely manipulate you into being sad
Funnily enough, this is how I quit Imgur for good. It's amazing. I posted something that I believed was right and got downvoted to hell.
So I started asking people "why, why do you downvote?" and got mostly laughs, memes and people calling me stupid. Except one person, who said "you care way too much about this". Indeed, I did. Thank you random person!
Not sure why but it affected me more on Imgur. Maybe it's the length of the comments? The memes that encompass a thousand words, as they say? Regardless, I just deleted my account and never went back. It's great.
Still trying to quit Reddit and HN, but they're good resources if you ignore all the stupidity. Imgur is bottom of the barrel social media, but it was fun.
And of course, this is used by various media outlets, has been for a long time.
It's all about eliciting emotions, which come from the primitive part of the brain, bypassing any advanced conscious analysis and engaging the impulse to do either what you're told (good for sales) or the opposite of it (good for spreading a message) or something in between, but it's a response that you will remember and most likely take action.
I forgot what I was trying to say. Somehow Facebook never got me, it's just a useless platform aside from contacting people.
I used to be very active in HN until I got into a heated discussion with someone and since then my HN "flag" privileges were stripped away.
I know I shouldn't care, but I couldn't help it. Now I am just lurking on HN and rarely reply with this new account using TOR and care as little about "karma" as I do about "producing value" with my replies to HN.
HN is exactly the same as Reddit, just a different crowd and less edge. It's nice to think that you can have a civil discussion on the HN platform but you can't. The whole internet karma/points is a flawed system.
For HN: You should have to give a reason to down votes. To give someone downvote permissions and then allow them to downvote on something they bias, isn't far.
Because no one would ever lie or put noise in the "why I downvoted" field.
See downvoted already, point proven.
The Snowden leaks were a turning point, I think, when people realized “the NSA and corporations are spying on you” wasn’t just a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory.
It’s mind blowing to think that most major sites on the internet (including Amazon) were not using HTTPS at that time. It’s possible Amazon used it on its payment pages, but it certainly didn’t for much of the site. Tools like FireSheep existed for years before anyone started to care that everyone from your coffeeshop to your ISP could read your plaintext traffic.
Now 9 years later we’re finally about to fix DNS (albeit with protocols hostile to reverse engineering). Then hopefully up next is fixing BGP before the bad guys realize how absurdly vulnerable it is.
All this is to say, Facebook could maybe be excused for this experiment, because our standards for “that’s messed up” were already so much lower in 2012 than they are now.
I don't trust Facebook one bit. I assume they do this kind of illegal 'experiment' all the time now, and the only change is they stopped bragging about it.
So gross, this whole thing, it makes me mad there were no real repercussions from this. Worse yet is how many people actually support this unethical and sick experiment from Facebook.
Lots of people don't see anything wrong with it, even technical people like those on HN, and that is just as disturbing to me as Facebook actually carrying it out.
---
Edit: I'm now blocked from posting on HN (for a while I guess?), so here is my response to a poster below.
@antiterra says,
> That you’d prefer they either stayed ignorant or unconcerned to what changes they made and their effect is exceedingly awful and morally bankrupt.
I have no idea how you reached the conclusion that I would prefer either of those things. There is a massive chasm between 'perform illegal, unethical mass psychological experiments' and 'I don't care about stuff'.
---
@chatmasta says I'm not blocked, but I am. I cannot reply to you either. It says I'm posting too fast and won't let me submit any content.
Oh 100% they do. But hey at least they've contributed Presto back to the community!
> Lots of people don't see anything wrong with it
Surely that's not true. In 2021, Facebook is largely hated by people on all sides of all political spectrums. [Remember when people thought Zuck would run for president? Lol!]
(Edit:
> I'm now blocked from posting on HN
You're not blocked; you just can't reply to someone within a minute of their post past a certain nesting level.
(Edit edit: Oh guess you're right! That's annoying. :/ But I am enjoying our conversation via edit nonetheless!)
)
Edit re your edit response:
It is absurd to me that deciding whether to show more or less ‘I got a new car’ posts based on the resulting behavior is some kind of sinister event. Even the author of this article struggles to articulate why this isn’t just standard A/B testing.
Nevermind the fact that the former aren’t direct actions on customers (Amazon wasn’t not showing https for only certain users) while the latter is a direct, concentrated, understood action on customers.
The two aren’t similar at all.
If you want to document Facebook's ethical lapses, you could go all the way back to 2004. But it's only the past few years people started actually caring.