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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

I still don't see why I should be outraged over this. A user of facebook already consents to facebook displaying whatever content on their feed facebook chooses. Why should facebook require extra consent to gather scientific evidence on the effects of the content being displayed, given they are only analyzing data they already gather?

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To be fair, since this has been a while ago it's hard to tell what to do about this. Personally I find it hard to draw any conclusions from this just due to the time that has passed. I don't use Facebook, so maybe it's just my distance from it. But it has happened and it's worth stating that this is basically a psychological experiment and not a simple A/B test, but at a company that most likely at the time didn't have an ethics board to review this.

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.

Let's imagine hypothetically that sad, negative posts get more engagement by whatever metric Facebook uses, and Facebook was paying no attention to sentiments at all and ending up putting more sad posts on feeds. Would that have been unethical? I can't really see what would be so different.

Is it unethical to create an automated system that maximizes global unhappiness for profit?

When a movie makes the audience sad, it wins Oscars, we don't censor it. Why should the rules be different for Facebook?

That is a banal comparison. When a film makes you sad, you are aware of what is going on. If you are unusually sensitive to these types of emotions, you can read about the film ahead of time to see if you might want to avoid it.

Do you typically go read a synopsis of the entire plot of a film, including any surprise developments, before watching it?

No?

Ok. Then what you’re saying doesn’t make sense.

Why?

Because films’ promotions may deliberately conceal information about tragic events in the story to achieve maximum impact and nobody thinks that is unethical.

This feels a lot like talking to Eliza. Your replies very vaguely connect to what’s being discussed in this thread, but there’s just no substance or coherency to the argument.

"When a film makes you sad you are aware of what's going on" is your claim, but I don't see how that applies to something like, say, Terminator 2, whose entire goal, according to Cameron, was "making the audience cry for the Terminator," yet was not promoted as a sad film. It's hard to come up with a principled difference here.

The Terminator 2 audience knows the film is an authored fictional story. It can make someone cry when they didn’t expect it, but they understand that the filmmakers are intentionally trying to provoke certain emotions. If you can’t see the myriad principled differences between that situation, and logging onto Facebook expecting to see an unfiltered selection of posts, I really can’t believe you are trying hard.

If you'll scroll up a bit you'll see this subthread begins when I propose a thought experiment where the "natural" order yields the same results and ask if it's unethical, and people tell me that yes, they think it is. But now you're specifically calling attention to an unmet expectation of "unfiltered" posts (I'd question whether anyone has such an expectation, although the specifics of the curation are not advertised). I think this gets away from what I was talking about in the first place.

It's hard to get a lot of positive reinforcement by interacting with like-minded others at scale through a movie. Facebook's original stated intent was to study contagion of emotion, which seems to me to suggest a multiplayer, interactive effect.

Well, if so the problem goes a bit deeper than Facebook.

Yes, that would be deeply unethical. And to make matters worse, I believe that’s a fairly accurate description of how Facebook works.

So how could someone ethically run social media of any stripe?

Exactly, we have no idea if HN is supressing positive stories in an experiment or not. Twitter, reddit, FB, tictok all sort content by magic and could be trying to make you sad.

I don’t understand how this question can follow. Are you suggesting that social media simply must optimize for engagement and not pay attention to negative consequences?

What does that mean? Like, we want the Facebook mods to delete anything that's too depressing? Sounds more dystopian rather than less... and I thought we were supposed to be worried about "duck syndrome" where everyone appears to be having great lives, making you feel bad, because you don't see the negatives (like a duck paddling underwater, see?).

Because "consent" is worthless if it is not informed consent. And it's neither expected by, nor in the interest of the user to be emotionally manipulated.

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.

But "emotional manipulation" may already be happening by using the website. If the user gave consent to that, I don't see what difference the act of gathering scientific data makes. Your argument seems to be against the current bar of consent that facebook and similar sites are required to get.

The user never consented to "emotional manipulation". If anything, the user consented to usage of an algorithmic newsfeed that ranks posts based on unknown criteria, but always with "relevance" as the overall goal. There is nothing about emotional manipulation in this.

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)

Emotional manipulation was scare quoted for a reason. Consent to "rank posts based on unknown criteria to maximize relevance" will incidentally, at least on some occasions, cause "emotional manipulation" in the consumers of the feed. So again, consent is already provided for the possibility of emotional manipulation. What's the difference between accidental and scientifically valid emotional manipulation such that extra consent is needed?

> Consent to "rank posts based on unknown criteria to maximize relevance" will incidentally, at least on some occasions, cause "emotional manipulation" in the consumers of the feed.

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...

http://www.maxmasnick.com/2014/06/28/facebook/

>Why is that automatically the case and how would the user know that?

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...

This is unethical psychological research against non-consenting adults and children that likely caused real harm. From a paper cited below,

> 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.

Again, that means if they just accepted the wisdom of the time, which was the ‘common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out’ and unilaterally limited positive content, they’d still possibly be creating more negative feelings and causing this ‘harm.’ But, you know, it’d be all ethical, since they didn’t look at the data or run an A/B test.

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