I strongly hope that they won't care about any of this "outrage" and continue to do more and more experiments. Maybe even open it up as a platform for scientists to conduct studies.
Facebook is in the unique position of possessing data that can be orders of magnitude more useful for social studies than surveys of randomly picked college students that happened to pass through your hallway. There's lot of good to be made from it.
But the bigger issue I see here is why it's unethical to "manipulate user emotions" for research, when every salesman, every ad agency, every news portal and every politician does this to the much bigger extent and it's considered fair? It doesn't make much sense for me (OTOH I have this attitude, constantly backed by experience, that everything a salesmen says is a malicious lie until proven otherwise).
It's an interesting question. I have the same averse reaction to this story that a lot of people here have, but I admit I also thought, "If Facebook hadn't published this as research, but just had it as a business decision to drive more usage or positive associations with the website, no one would care."
My own way to reconcile this -- and I admit it's not a mainstream view -- is that advertisement and salesmanship should be considered just as unethical. I don't know how to quantify what "over the line" is, but it all feels like brain-hacking. Things like "The Century of the Self" suggest that in the past century or so we've become extremely good at finding the little tricks and failings of human cognition and taking advantage of vulnerabilities of our reasoning to inject the equivalent of malicious code. The problem is that when I say "we" I don't mean the average person, and there's an every-growing asymmetry. Like malware developers adapting faster than anti-malware developers, most people have the same level of defense that they always have had, while the "attackers" have gotten better and better at breaking through defenses.
Sometimes I'll see discussions about "what will people centuries from now think was crazy about our era?" and there's a part of me that keeps coming back to the idea that the act of asymmetrically exploiting the faults of human thinking is considered normal and "just the way things are."
> My own way to reconcile this -- and I admit it's not a mainstream view -- is that advertisement and salesmanship should be considered just as unethical.
I agree with that, or probably think even more strongly - that advertisements/sales are more unethical than research. It's difficult to put limits though, because even if many salesmen clearly act maliciously, pretty much everything you do or say influences people this way or another; it's how we communicate.
What I'd love to see is Facebook creating an opt-in option for an user to be a part of further sociological research. I'd gladly turn it on and be happy that I'm helping humanity, while Facebook could limit their studies to people who explicitly consented (there's an issue with selection bias though). They have too good data to be not used for the betterment of mankind.
Good point. I guess my concern -- recognizing this makes me sound like a Luddite or someone going on about "humans were never meant to know about this" -- is that the results of research like this aren't going to be used for the betterment of mankind. Rather, it'll be all about how to use a new mental vulnerability to get more eyeballs on someone's content or to increase the dopamine hits from browsing the site.
What I would love -- and what I would eagerly opt-in to -- would be a system where Facebook could educate users on irrational behaviors. "We noticed that 60% of users like you spent an average of 30 seconds more looking at this kind of content... this is because your brain etc etc etc". Creepy, perhaps, but if there were a way to help people be more aware of and defend against advertisement that would be neat.
> Rather, it'll be all about how to use a new mental vulnerability to get more eyeballs on someone's content or to increase the dopamine hits from browsing the site.
Sadly, you've made a great point here. It's very likely that the end results of research will be used exactly for that - as it already happens with most of psychology.
I hope though that some of that research will be used to create better policies and help the society.
> What I would love -- and what I would eagerly opt-in to -- would be a system where Facebook could educate users on irrational behaviors.
I'd happily opt-in to that as well (and opt-in all my relatives too ;)). I don't expect Facebook to ever do that, as it'd exactly opposite to their goal to be able to a/ influence their users, and b/ cater for advertisers, but there already are websites doing exactly that (e.g. LessWrong). They're niche places though; I'd love to see something popular enough to reach general audience.
I don't agree no one would care. It seems like you're basically saying no one cares if you don't get caught. That's true for anything from murder to theft to NSA spying.
As for advertising trying to manipulate you you know it's an ad and there seem to be regulations for making that clear. For example things that look like articles in magazines but are actually ads are marked as "Special Advertising Section". Similarly ads for political candidates have to be marked "Paid for by XYZ". etc.
We don't tolerate deception in those areas why would we tolerate it from FB?
> For example things that look like articles in magazines but are actually ads are marked as "Special Advertising Section".
Sadly, we've learned how to work around all of that; it's now called the PR industry. There's no way to spot a good PR campaign until after the fact because no single "fake organic news", no single article that happened to be published at a particular time can be pointed to and said "hey, that's an ad!". Bump up the scale and people will stop noticing.
It's a matter of algorithmic scale. What would be the result of a social network (or anyone really) creating fictional users for the purpose of running social experiments on humans whose permission was not requested?
The speech of one salesman/politician is different from thousands of machines impersonating human speech. Speech is protected in some countries. Fake speech (e.g. experiments/spam) decreases the trust of humans in all speech on the network.
In anyone wants to run large-scale experiments, they can:
(a) ask for volunteers
(b) pay for labor
Those who want to volunteer or microtask can (a) opt-in for money or fame, (b) disclose that they have opted-in, so that others know that their conversations are part of an experiment.
Why is advertising (e.g. a promoted tweet) differentiated from non-advertising? Why is "disclosure" required in journalism? Why are experiments differentiated from non-experiments?
The act of observation changes the behavior of the observed. If experiments are not disclosed and clearly demarcated, users must defensively assume that they may be observed/experimented upon, which affects behavior in the entire network. As a side-effect, this pollutes any conclusions which may be drawn from future "social" research.
>The act of observation changes the behavior of the observed. If experiments are not disclosed and clearly demarcated, users must defensively assume that they may be observed/experimented upon, which affects behavior in the entire network. As a side-effect, this pollutes any conclusions which may be drawn from future "social" research.
Sounds like the effect the Snowden revelations have had on some discourse or interactions online, now that people more clearly know that someone may be listening.
> What I would love -- and what I would eagerly opt-in to -- would be a system where Facebook could educate users on irrational behaviors.
That's exactly the reason why most of psychological/sociological experiments are not disclosed. If you read an accout of pretty much any experiment, you'll see that scientists told their volunteers that they're doing X, where in fact they were doing completely different Y. You need people to be unaware of the true goals of your research for your results to make any sense.
I would think that everyone expects salespeople, ads, news, and politicians to be acting in their own interest, and therefore takes precautions to counteract that.
Facebook, though, pretends to be a communication service. The general expectation from a communication service is that it transmits information between users, thus users expect that what they see or hear coming out of the communication service is what the person at the other end has said/that the person at the other end will see what they say. A service that doesn't provide that isn't really a communication service at all, by definition - and lacking any other uses, isn't really good for anything. Just imagine a phone company with advanced speech recognition and synthesis software in the line that rewrites your conversations to be happier (or any other quality that the company or its customers prefer).
> I would think that everyone expects salespeople, ads, news, and politicians to be acting in their own interest, and therefore takes precautions to counteract that.
You're underestimating human irrationality and how communication works. No one has enough brainpower to constantly correct everything they hear for someone's self-interest. That's why ads work. They're identifying and exploiting methods for bypassing rational thought.
> The general expectation from a communication service is that it transmits information between users, thus users expect that what they see or hear coming out of the communication service is what the person at the other end has said/that the person at the other end will see what they say.
No, Facebook is a curated communication service. Always has been. You wouldn't be able to keep up with raw, unfiltered stream of posts by your friends and liked pages. This would turn the service useless.
Are you sure you are not missing the point? Whether curated or not, the expectation of users certainly is not that it's curated according to facebook's interest of the day, but according to their own interests (that is, to reduce noise, not to influence them), and whether perfect or not, people certainly do expect and counteract lying in ads.
Also, just because ads are generally perceived with some scepticism, doesn't mean that certain kinds of ads aren't unethical as well. In particular, ads that exploit methods of bypassing rational thought might indeed be unethical, and certainly are not the same as just general self-interested advertisement. And despite what you claim, manipulation is actually not a defining property of ads - if you have a product to sell that is actually a rational thing to buy, advertisement can use perfectly rational thinking in order to pursuade you to buy it. Just because much of end-consumer directed advertisement nowadays is trying to sell bullshit, doesn't mean that advertisement can only be used to sell bullshit.
Facebook is in the unique position of possessing data that can be orders of magnitude more useful for social studies than surveys of randomly picked college students that happened to pass through your hallway. There's lot of good to be made from it.
But the bigger issue I see here is why it's unethical to "manipulate user emotions" for research, when every salesman, every ad agency, every news portal and every politician does this to the much bigger extent and it's considered fair? It doesn't make much sense for me (OTOH I have this attitude, constantly backed by experience, that everything a salesmen says is a malicious lie until proven otherwise).