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Facebook Will Change How It Uses People In Experiments

Facebook plans to change the way it conducts research, after its social experiment that manipulated users’ news feeds received an outpouring of criticism.

On Thursday, the company admitted that the way they handled the “emotional contagion” experiment could have been handled differently, and announced a new research framework that includes guidelines, a review policy, training, and a new research website dedicated to the company’s academic research.

In June, Facebook published a paper detailing how it used news feed posts to determine whether positive or negative posts had an effect on users’ moods. Almost 700,000 people unknowingly participated in the study, and when the results were published, Facebook users and members of the academic and scientific communities were outraged.

See also: How To Opt Out Of Facebook’s Mind Altering Experiments

The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission in the wake of the publicized research, because at the time of the experiments, Facebook did not explain in its data use policy that personal information would be shared with researchers.

Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer wrote in a blog post that the company didn’t anticipate the negative feedback. One thing Facebook should’ve considered, he wrote, was other non-experimental ways of doing the research, and that it could have benefitted by having more people, and more senior leadership, review the research. 

It’s important to engage with the academic community and publish in peer-reviewed journals, to share technology inventions and because online services such as Facebook can help us understand more about how the world works.

The new framework announced Wednesday includes both internal research and research that might be published for the world to see, though Schroepfer doesn’t describe in detail what the guidelines or the review policy might be.

Research Moving Forward

The company didn’t say anything about getting informed consent from users, one of the major criticisms of the Facebook study. While the company’s data use policy now states that users’ information might be used for research, it didn’t inform any of the 689,003 people in the emotional contagion study that their information would be used to figure out if posts make people happy or sad. And if people continue to agree to the data use policy, which few people even read, it appears that simply using Facebook is enough of a consent for future research. 

See also: Everyone’s A Lab Rat In OkCupid’s Labyrinth Of Love

Although the research had plenty of critics, a handful of people came out in support of the experiments Facebook was running, including dating site OkCupid and venture capitalist and Facebook board of directors member Marc Andreessen

Shortly after Facebook’s research was released, OkCupid published its own study, in which it described the way the company manipulates potential matches in an effort to figure out how people date. Though the splashy claims of experiments were meant to support Facebook, OkCupid’s research was little more than A/B testing.

Companies regularly run experiments on users—it’s how they determine the best products, features and services to provide customers. And although Facebook says it will be more cautious in the future, the fact of the matter is, the only way to avoid being part of Facebook’s social experiments is to quit the site entirely

Lead photo by Dimitris Kalogeropoylos on Flickr

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