U.K. to Probe Facebook Emotion Study

Most people on FB are using FB assuming it's a utility something like email, without realising that it is like email, if email had its own agenda. It's really easy to forget that most people in this world do not live/work in the echo chamber that we do. When I talk to them about the issues, sure, at best they might profess to understand or even be concerned at the time of that conversation, but by and large they won't change their behaviour and the conversation will be quickly forgotten.

Never underestimate the indifference with which people can view the inner workings of technology.

0. I see the fact that I find this hard to imagine as a form of "Expert Blindness" or "Knowledge Blindness". If someone has a better or more accepted term for this phenomenon, I'd like to hear it.

My problem is with the goal of the manipulation in this case. Its not something like "persuade people to view pages". Its (as I understand it) "make people sad" or "make people happy". As someone who personally battles with emotional episodes, could something like this have inadvertently triggered an episode for me? Can I prove it?

Some people have put forward the argument that advertising is by definition a mood influencer and we see it everywhere. However, that doesn't mean that we allow all advertising. We frown on tobacco advertising because it influences people to buy an unhealthy product. We frown on displaying unhealthy bodies because of the impact it has on our self-images.

tl;dr; I'm not saying feed manipulation is bad. I'm saying the goal of the manipulation in this case was potentially ill-conceived.

I'd think Facebook has even less control, and more difficultly predicting emotions. For example, if Facebook displays a post about Jane having a bad day and losing her job, that's bad news. However, it's difficult to determine how I'll react. It might be comforting for me to know someone else is having a bad day, it might make me angry that Jane lost her job, when I lost my job at the same business the week prior, it might make me happy because Jane is always bragging about her job, and I no longer have to hear about it.

When it comes to a movie, I think there's a lot more control since you write the script and characters from start to finish. Every person in the audience has the same relationship with those characters, and knows them for their entirety. You also have fine grain control over the visuals, combined with carefully selected music. As I said earlier, all of this can lead to a room full of people leaving the theater in tears, so I don't see the difference.

Or, when you say we do at our own will, you mean we make the choice to visit the theater in the first place? That would be no different than making the choice to visit Facebook. If anything, you should be questioning every advertising campaign in existence. They're carefully crafted to evoke a certain emotion, and they work specifically because they can manipulate people. At the same time, people have no choice to view them, they're constantly exposed to these manipulations just by walking outdoors or visiting the store to buy groceries.