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Comment by ilrwbwrkhv | Hacker News Reader

One small example: In 2012 Facebook emotionally manipulated people in the name of science without anybody's consent by controlling positive / negative posts on their news feed.

Right? Wrong? Discuss.

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Textbook case of unethical conduct of research. The key here is lack of informed consent by the study participants.

The APA put out a press release about this study violated their code of ethics.

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/06/informed-con...

I can't put any facebook developer in the same bucket as a guard at a concentration camp.

Because a concentration camp guard would be jailed or killed for refusing service, but a FB dev would lose a few $thousand in opportunity?

Working at a faang level company is associated with a large enough increase in income that it could support a handful of families in developing countries. I don't know what purpose it serves to downplay just how substantial that amount of money is.

I think that was wrong. At the same time, drawing lines of good/bad at the boundaries of the people working at facebook is, imo, not useful.

https://xkcd.com/1390/

I don't see the issue. Every social media site does this, FB was just naive enough to share their research

And this just proved my point. During the Nazi regime, everyone was hating the jews. And everyone was doing fascism.

Now to bring this to a close, people like you, who will jump companies for 20_000 and have lost the ability to see a clear ethical violation will be holding the guns and guarding the gas chambers when the next Hitler comes along. Meditate on this.

Also this XKCD is dumb. Previously the feed was chronological post of friends which was definitely more ethical. But of course that didn't make people addicted enough.

If that proved your point, you didn’t have a point. If you can’t see the difference between genocide and lack of informed consent on a social network algorithm experiment you can’t be helped.

I’m all for moral relativism, but there’s no future in which Facebook’s current actions aren’t at least reasonably debatable, and no past in which Auschwitz was.

If you wanted an example of where the line gets blurry (it does sometimes, just not in either of these) I’d go with pharmaceuticals.

One thing I have learned from the internet is that if you mention the Nazis or the Jews, you lose, good day sir, even if you are right.

People are illogical.

Yeah I was only trying to give an extreme example of someone being unethical working an immoral job, contrasting that with, say, working for Ticketmaster, which, as much as I despise them, is hard to equate with the Holocaust, given that one killed millions of civilians and one just costs me a little money. I should have known better.

They seem very different to me and anymore, I almost think that’s a valid test of the reasonable person standard.

Did you get informed consent from me regarding the methods by which you constructed your comment? Or are you manipulating my emotions unethically?

> people like you, who will jump companies for 20_000

???

I said I don't find A/B tests unethical. Literally every tech company runs A/B tests just like that one. Why would I ask for 20k more?

> Previously the feed was chronological post of friends

Yeah, before they measured the impact of a good recommendation algorithm.

And back when you could log into Facebook and see a feed of all of your friends’ posts quickly. Facebook eventually got to the point where for most people the feed would have been much longer than the time they wanted to spend on site, and so showing them just the most recent few is somewhat random. Much better for engagement to show them posts they like.

The issue is the lack of informed consent. This is pretty basic ethical conduct of research stuff.

I have never seen a social media site ask for consent for A/B testing their new things. Everyone does this, I am pretty sure even the big news sites that wrote those headlines also does this without asking. The only thing facebook did differently was calling it research rather than A/B testing.

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