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There are better ways to question the ethics of the experiment. Here's a simple approach:

Would anyone want their emotions manipulated to be unhappy or unhealthy?

The corollary in a medical experiment would be, would a healthy person want to undergo an experiment that could make them sick?

Some people mentioned advertising as a counterpoint, that what Facebook does is not at all different from advertising's psychological manipulation. Well maybe some forms of advertising ought to be regulated too. Would a child voluntarily want their emotions manipulated by a Doritos ad to make the sicker or fatter?

Even if it's not known what the outcome is, the two points are:

(1) Facebook's various policies specify you will randomly participate in their studies, but

(2) It matters if an experimental outcome can harm you.

So even though you agreed to participate in experiments, you weren't told the experiments could hurt you. That is a classic medical ethics violation, and it ought to be a universal scientific ethics violation.

> The corollary in a medical experiment would be, would a healthy person want to undergo an experiment that could make them sick?

Yes, many people would willingly volunteer to take experimental drugs that

i) might not work

ii) might uave severe side effects

because those people are dying and want some months more life.

Note the parent comment said "healthy". Last I checked, healthy != dying.

science doesn't take place just in the lab.

every time someone asks me 'how are you doing' and doesn't mean it, it makes me a little less happy inside. i have to work hard to focus my thoughts on their intent - to greet me - and not on the fact that they asked a question i'd love to answer but they don't want to hear the answer to, because they don't mean what they are saying.

it hurts.

but nobody's going to say it's "unethical" to ask people how they're doing unless you mean it.

so if someone gauges people's reactions, and realizes 'hey, people don't like this' - they've already commited an "ethical violation" according to research ethics defined this way.

people don't like emotional manipulation. i get that - but laws don' fix the problem. laws ignore emotion; they make no special cases. if anything, our society's obsession with rules that are specifically designed to _prevent_ emotion from changing our decision making just makes this worse.

"Well maybe some forms of advertising ought to be regulated too."

In the UK, advertising using subliminal messages/stimuli is not permitted: "No advertisement may use images of very brief duration, or any other technique that is likely to influence consumers, without their being fully aware of what has been done."[0]

[0] Source: http://www.cap.org.uk/Advertising-Codes/Broadcast-HTML/Secti...

> place where they can see any and all of their friends' updates.

But that's the thing - Facebook have been manipulating your feed for years based on what it thought you would be interested in: favoring popular posts, posts from those you interact with frequently, posts that it thinks could be popular etc. There's always been 'most recent' which is a more accurate timeline, and as far as I know Facebook never manipulated that.

While I neither agree nor disagree with whether the study was right or not, it wasnt with this study that they 'misrepresented people and their lives'. Facebook has been doing that for years!

The consequences of an activity are context dependent.

http://civic.mit.edu/blog/petey/betraying-expectations-in-us...

"I've begun to think that if you, like me, found yourself surprised by these case studies, or nodding along with them as variations on a familiar theme of “gaming the system,” then it is because we came to the cases expecting or wanting something else. Some baseline behavior which ought to have been in action, some baseline norm which ought to have been observed, but wasn’t, rendering the results of the process suspect, “altered,” “manipulated,” “unnatural,” relative to some unaltered, unmanipulated, natural baseline, which would exist but for sin and sinners. But what are these baselines? Where do they come from?

These are not, as they say, purely academic questions. The answers not only explain why we find some behavior problematic: they create the very possibility of the problem itself. The opportunity for subversion arises from the gap between intended and actual use of a system. James Grimmelmann once wrote that “if we must imagine intellectual property law, it must also imagine us.” When engineers design social systems they must imagine both possible uses and devise methods to make sure the uses are producing desired results, endlessly iterating upon the real to move it closer to the ideal."

They ostensibly did that to make the experience better for users. In this case they did it to make them feel worse.

No, they did it to study user reaction to a ratio of positive/negative posts. Its entirely possible that people would be more engaged if they received more negative news from their friends because of empathy, schadenfreude, or simply that knowing others aren't perfect provokes people to feel unashamed about posting.

Whilst the experiment only looked at a single metric, facebook themselves likely looked at all metrics.

Secondly, can we really say people felt 'worse'. Hypothetically, people may feel better if they see brief happy news in a sea of negative news, rather than seeing only happy news all the time with a few negatives since what is rare gets a stronger reaction. Do we know this is true or not? Not without a study...

From the article, they know they felt worse because the subjects' own posts subsequently became more negative.

that doesn't mean they felt worse. maybe they were matching the tone they were seeing around them? if you're giggly at a funeral, you're going to piss off the people around you and make everyone feel worse. you can keep the giggliness inside and pretend to be all somber and serious without affecting your mood.

http://www.today.com/health/stop-cheering-me-some-people-don...

if anything, you could argue that facebook helped the people posting negative statuses who got more views, comments, and likes on the things they were struggling with.

Sometimes I write negative things after reading negative things, but it's ultimately an enriching experience for me.

> Its entirely possible that people would be more engaged if they received more negative news

Or the other way around, there have been many articles about social network envy, having to keep up with the FB Joneses in terms of having an exciting life etc.

I wouldn't have been surprised if people felt worse after looking only at positive status updates...

We do know that there are elements of contagion around suicidality and self harm. People use the word "trigguring" (a bit problematic because the word has spread from and to other situations which have different levels of appropriateness) but yes, we are pretty sure that someone with anorexia who spends a lot of time talking to other people with anorexia, especially if they're actively sharing thinspo tips, is going to find recovery harder and that this is causal.

While it's great that people with lots of data do research, and there are problems with ethics panels[1], we should be very careful with anything designed to manipulate emotions.

[1] Ben Goldacre talks about this http://www.badscience.net/2011/03/when-ethics-committees-kil...

I think the difference between that hearing generally 'negative newsposts' is direction.

People who are sharing tips to stay thin, (or tips on football, or living a 'moral' life, etc.) have a stated goal in mind, so it shouldn't be surprising if they succeed in it.

NOBODY thinks that Facebook is a place to see all your friends' updates. And it has never been anything like that.

What Marc was getting at was that this is A/B testing. Everybody does A/B testing these days. Claiming it is "unethical" because the B group might be less happy than the A group is ridiculous. That's essentially the whole point of A/B testing. Try two things and see what makes your users happier, then you can do more of that.

Is there a difference between A/B testing which surveys "taste" and A/B testing which causes "behavior change"? There is the small matter of side-effects..

I couldn't agree more. What if someone who was part of the experiment group committed suicide? Where's the duty of care?

I am guessing somewhere below their duty to their shareholders?

That was sort of snark at Facebook, but it is a difficult legal question. However, it also sounds like a bit of a beat-up, like the Strava lawsuit.

You are not gauranteed by Facebook for a service that allows you to communicate in a clearly defined way. They are allowed to, an do, tweak it constantly to improve whatever metric they think will result in more engagement and bottom line. Much like google tweaks their search results (or their cafeteria food) these companies are always running experiments. In this case, it resulted in a paper. The researchers who published the paper might have to ensure they upheld the ethical obligations of the journal, and any affiliated institutions. If they did, the fact this is published is a better outcome then normal.

[0] http://cyclingtips.com.au/2012/06/strava-lawsuit/

Well, I used to think that. Back in 2004 when it started, you could and wanted to see all your friends updates, and even for years afterwards. Now, it's probably less than 10% of everything you'll ever see, others are purposefully hidden from you. Facebook was a social place, and was supposed to be "the place to keep in touch with friends", so yeah, wanted to see 100%...

But then everyone around you and me joined as well and now an average Facebook user has over 300 friends (I myself have 568); there's no way to keep up with all their updates even if everyone sent just on average two posts a day. And that doesn't even include various thousands of pages one liked.

If they let everything in unfiltered, it would probably start looking like Twitter - a place I don't frequent because it's just damn too noisy for me even if I follow just few dozen people.

It's also worth noting that this is not (contrary to Andreessen's disingenuous tweet) a case of a website accidentally tripping over scientific-ethics norms through its normal course of operations, unaware that what they're doing might be considered a psychology study.

This was explicitly a psychology study, performed by professional psychologists, for the purpose of collecting data publishable in a journal! The lead author (and the Facebook employee on the project), A.D.I. Kramer, has a PhD in social psychology. I think it's perfectly reasonable in that setting to expect the researchers to be following the norms of scientific ethics.

The difference between Facebook and Twitter on your last point is that Facebook does it for you like a gentleman, and twitter has you pick feeds which will never disagree with you manually.

Either way you're just going to listen to the least dissenting material you can find, might as well let them figure it out for you.

Maybe the difference is between moral good with questionable ethics, and moral mediocrity with unquestionable ethics.