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>Facebook run fun psychological experiments to see if they can manipulate their users - without calling for volunteers first or anything I recognise as ethics.

I've always wondered: How is that different from A/B testing, or any other marketing experiment?

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Two things:

- They weren't experimenting or measuring ads, clickthroughs, or pageviews views; they were experimenting on and measuring emotions directly

- It was run as a psychological study, and published as a psychological study

they were experimenting on and measuring emotions directly

Every change to an interface can potentially affect the emotions of users, whether or not you try to measure it.

I won't disagree with your statement, but there's a very large difference between intentionally changing a user's mood by modifying their news feed vs. indirectly and unintentionally affecting a users mood via an interface change.

Except in that experiment Facebook was intentionally trying to manipulate users' emotional states.

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