Facebook proves that people can get hurt feelz over the interwebs!

[JamGorby]

http://www.avclub.com/article/facebook-tinkered-users-feeds-massive-psychology-e-206324
 

 

Scientists at Facebook have published a paper showing that they manipulated the content seen by more than 600,000 users in an attempt to determine whether this would affect their emotional state. The paper, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” was published in The Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences. It shows how Facebook data scientists tweaked the algorithm that determines which posts appear on users’ news feeds—specifically, researchers skewed the number of positive or negative terms seen by randomly selected users. Facebook then analyzed the future postings of those users over the course of a week to see if people responded with increased positivity (sic) or negativity of their own, thus answering the question of whether emotional states can be transmitted across a social network. Result: They can!

If this is true, Facebook just wasted a lot of resources to find out what people on 4chan, reddit, and pretty much any other social gathering or forum on the internet already knew. Yes, you can transmit butthurt over the internet. 

Though 600,000 sheep might be beetling about Facebook messing with their fragile cortices, my main concern is whether or not this may have dipped in to the Oculus development budget.

 

[Unhelpful]

What? No! Go F**k yourself! How dare you?!

[dragosudeki]

'Scientists at Facebook'.... I laugh at that statement.... Its like those scientists didn't about the internet until now...

[BallGum]

TL;DR Butthurt is contagious.

[Askew]

Sons of bitches

[mansoor_]

tl;dr 

evil company does evil thing,

get mad!!

[JamGorby]

'Scientists at Facebook'.... I laugh at that statement.... Its like those scientists didn't about the internet until now...

I had to chuckle too. I was like "Facebook has scientists!!??"

[LukaP]

basically theyve shown that facebook can act the same as tumblr... lots of depressed people, lots of depressed posts...

[o3871]

Next ---> Facebook to buy the world !!

[Manny Calavera]

I had to chuckle too. I was like "Facebook has scientists!!??"

PR scientists, marketing department

 

where do i apply?

[JAKEBAB]

Its true my nipples are usually hard as but when someone says something mean to me on the internet they just sag down The internet is serious guys!

[Misanthrope]

Yeah, I'd be more unhappy about the fact that Facebook manipulated my content without my informed consent. And if they did asked for permission then the entire study is invalid.

[JamGorby]

It surprises me more that anyone would be surprised, in all honesty. People have been mindlessly pouring their lives on there for years now. If ever there was a collection of guinea pigs to experiment on...... 

[That Norwegian Guy]

So I wasn't the only one who immediately put air quotes on "scientists".

 

Next ---> Facebook to buy the world !!

 

How dare you disgrace our flag with your Comic Sans?!?!

[o3871]

So I wasn't the only one who immediately put air quotes on "scientists".

 

 

How dare you disgrace our flag with your Comic Sans?!?!

 

Fordi jeg ikke gjør det lenger

[Camul]

It's reasons like this that make me glad I don't use that service. Fucking with people's emotional state is wrong, and this study is pointless because we all knew it already. I just hope the impact that it had on some people isn't too serious.

[minimalist]

I have a little bit of a problem with this.  People didn't sign up for Facebook knowing Facebook would be using them as guinea pigs.  It's a social networking site, not a case study.  Was anyone offered an option to opt out?  I don't think so.

[Ashaira]

I would be upset about them using their users data to experiment but hey no sane person uses facebook so i'll just laugh at the poor suckers who use it for anything other than finding people.

[mymouthandi]

The story here really should be that millions (billions??) of people accepted the T&Cs of Facebook were it states that they are within their rights to do this crap.

 

I'm not sure anyone is shocked the sad stuff makes you sad...

[mr moose]

I fell like the term "scientist" is being bandied around a little too much these days,  it should be reserved for people who actually spend time educating themselves and pass exams,  Using "scientist" in an article automatically instills a mindset of understanding, honesty and thoroughness in the reader, but we all know they are human fallacies.  

 

In other news:  scientists at nestle discover chocolate can make you live longer and have bigger errections...

[deviant88]

Life is made of depression...

[euniqe]

In other news:

 

Sky is blue, grass is green.

[PillowSmoke]

 

A newly published paper reveals that scientists at Facebook conducted a massive psychological experiment on hundreds of thousands of users by tweaking their feeds and measuring how they felt afterward.

 

In other words, Facebook decided to try to manipulate some people's emotional states -- for science.

 

The research involved Facebook's News Feed -- the stream of status updates, photos and news articles that appears when you first fire up the site. For a week in January 2012, a group of researchers, variously affiliated with Facebook, Cornell University and the University of California, San Francisco, altered the algorithm that determines what shows up in News Feed for 689,003 people. One group was shown fewer posts containing words thought to evoke positive emotions, such as "love," "nice" and "sweet," while another group was shown fewer posts with negative words, like "hurt," "ugly" and "nasty." The findings were published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a scientific journal.

 

The researchers were studying a phenomenon called "emotional contagion," a fancy psychological term for something you've almost certainly experienced: If you spend more time with a happy-go-lucky friend, you end up being more of a ray of sunshine yourself. (Same goes for sadness: Hang with a Debbie Downer, and you likewise become a vector for gloom.) Researchers have found that emotions can be contagious during face-to-face interactions, when a friend's laugh or smile might lift your spirits. But what happens online? Facebook was trying to figure that out.

 

It turns out that, yes, the Internet is just like real life in this way. People who were shown fewer positive words on Facebook tended to turn around and write posts of their own that contained fewer positive words (and more negative words). And people who were shown fewer negative words tended, in turn, to write posts with fewer negative words and more positive words.

 

Hypothesis: proven!

 

In the PNAS article, lead researcher Adam Kramer and his team note that "the effect sizes from the manipulations are small." And in a statement to The Huffington Post, Facebook offered justification for doing the research.

 

"This research was conducted for a single week in 2012 and none of the data used was associated with a specific person's Facebook account," a company spokesperson told The Huffington Post. "We do research to improve our services and to make the content people see on Facebook as relevant and engaging as possible. A big part of this is understanding how people respond to different types of content, whether it's positive or negative in tone, news from friends, or information from pages they follow. We carefully consider what research we do and have a strong internal review process."

 

Still, reaction against Facebook was swift when the story was picked up by Animal and then the A.V. Club:

 

I wish I hadn’t quit Facebook so I could quit them all over again.

 

— John Birmingham (@JohnBirmingham) June 28, 2014

 

"Facebook isn’t just the place you see pic of your friends —it’s also an exciting research lab, with all of us as potential test subjects."

 

— Alba Mora Roca (@albamoraroca) June 29, 2014

 

Get off Facebook. Get your family off Facebook. If you work there, quit. They're fucking awful.

 

— Erin Kissane (@kissane) June 28, 2014

 

The researchers' findings aren't exactly trivial. If positivity begets more positivity online, we may be overblowing the whole idea of "F.O.M.O.," or "fear of missing out" -- the idea that pixel-perfect beach pictures and other evidence of fun fills Facebook friends with jealousy, not joy.

 

Facebook employs a group of data scientists to study user activity and publish their findings, often pegged to events like Valentine's Day and national elections. But until now, the research has mostly fallen into the category of "observational studies" -- that is, research that involves someone poring over existing data and trying to draw conclusions from it.

 

The News Feed manipulation, though, is a different beast. It's an experiment, in which scientists create the data by tweaking one variable to see if it affects another. That's what's disconcerting: The "things" being manipulated in this case are people on Facebook -- i.e., basically everyone with an Internet connection.

 

If you don't remember agreeing to being a Facebook guinea pig, well, you must not have read all of the site's mind-bogglingly complex terms of service when you set up your account. Within those TOS is language specifying that Facebook members consent to having information about them used for “internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.”

 

Even though this research was not illegal, Susan Fiske, the Princeton University psychology professor who edited the study for PNAS, was queasy about it. Fiske told The Atlantic:

 

I was concerned until I queried the authors and they said their local institutional review board had approved it -- and apparently on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people's News Feeds all the time.

 

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/29/facebook-experiment-psychological_n_5540018.html?utm_hp_ref=technology and btw sorry for the language.

 

[scaryjam823]

Well isn't that just lovely.

[Snickerzz]

Le repost

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/172912-facebook-proves-that-people-can-get-hurt-feelz-over-the-interwebs/