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?
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
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)?
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.
That said, anyone who signs up for a job at Facebook doesn't give a shit about ethical design of experiments.
There was a specific task force at Facebook intended to better understand customer psychology. Came from them.