Facebook slammed for secret psychological experiment

Facebook is facing widespread criticism after it was revealed that it conducted a psychological experiment by manipulating the newsfeeds of almost 700,000 users without their consent.

The research, carried out  in collaboration with two US universities over the course of one week in 2012, aimed to control the emotional expressions that users were exposed to in order to gauge whether “exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviours”.

The experiment hid “a small percentage” of emotional words from peoples’ news feeds, without their knowledge, to test what effect that had on the statuses or “Likes” that they then posted or reacted to.

Although Facebook claims “no unnecessary collection of people’s data”, experts have claimed that the test breached ethical guidelines relating to “informed consent”.

James Grimmelmann, professor of law at the University of Maryland, has claimed in a blog post that the failure to gain proper consent breached “the ethical and legal standard for human subjects research” in the US.

“The study harmed participants,” through “psychological manipulation”, Grimmelmann argues, adding: “This is bad, even for Facebook.”

Labour MP, Jim Sheridan, who is a member of the Commons media select committee, called for an investigation in to the matter, saying “This is extraordinarily powerful stuff and if there is not already legislation on this, then there should be to protect people,”

Adam Kramer of Facebook, who co-authored the report on the research, said: “We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out”.

“At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook.”

However, he admitted that the firm did not “clearly state our motivations in the paper”.

“I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my co-authors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused.”