Very serious. Where does it stop?

"It has published details of a vast experiment in which it manipulated information posted on 689,000 users' home pages and found it could make people feel more positive or negative through a process of "emotional contagion".

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-...

That’s not A/B testing, or at least not just A/B testing, that’s a full blown psych experiment.

But it's really not a one-off. This has become modern day marketing tactics. Guarantee someone gave a presentation today to a bunch of execs about how to manipulate a percentage of your users to achieve [x] goal by lightly "nudging" them.

Saying that A/B testing is just different colors for buttons is intentionally ignoring the past 10 years of facebooks development process. Every single aspect of the platform is AB tested and that platform has a big effect on peoples lives.

I'm still confused about why I'm supposed to be upset that Facebook A/B tests their features on their users. It seems to me that if they're allowed to do either A or B, they're allowed to measure the influence of A vs B. I don't see where the outrage is.

You shouldn't be upset about that. You should be upset that Facebook is performing tests on its users to optimize against the interests of those same users, without letting the user know what they're doing.

As I said in another comment this is about consent.

It's not that the testing the conversion rates of button a versus button b is in and of itself immoral, it's that experimenting on people without their informed consent, under any circumstances, is. I'm intimately familiar with FBs platform as a developer and a user and its my intuition that 9/10 people aren't aware of the degree to which they are being experimented on via multivariate testing and I think a reasonable person would say they have a right to be informed of this.

Another note is that after years of using the platform I can tell that when non-technical people DO become aware of the fact that their experience using the application is sometimes fundamentally different from others because they're in a non-control bucket they generally react pretty negatively to the notion. Sure, some of this is the standard "users always hate every UI change no matter what it is" syndrome but I've noted a lot of "this is creepy and i wonder how much it's been happening before" which is, imo, a super legitimate response, and shouldn't be disregarded because its inconvenient for fb to get consent.

Consent only applies for things you wouldn't be allowed to do without consent in the first place. What if Walmart decided to have the greeters at half of their stores be rude to customers and compare sales numbers? Would that require advance consent? Clearly it wouldn't because there is no law against bad service. The fact that the click whores who call themselves journalists (who are also competitors of FB) call it "psychological experiments" to scare non-technical people is irrelevant.

"What if Walmart decided to have the greeters at half of their stores be rude to customers and compare sales numbers? Would that require advance consent? "

To me, this could definitely qualify as "psychological experiments" if it were intentional as you describe. Most likely a failed and useless experiment though, but that's due to the medium and the difficulty to implement correctly (how would you guarantee none of your greeters step out of line? What if you wanted to quickly evolve and modify the experiment?).

The fact is that it's much easier to run these sort of experiments on a web site than it is in meat space. It can also be much subtler and far more specific. It would be impossible to manipulate the variations in the real world as efficiently (or at all) like you can online.

The ability to actually do this stuff efficiently and at scale is pretty recent, and we ought to consider and deliberate over the consequences.

Feature experiments are also a thing that exists. I want to deploy a new widget, and need to check that it works, and hasn't done something unexpected that drives users away. Experiments are how you do it.

How about these: Are corner stores allowed to experiment with pricing? Are restaurants allowed to experiment with new menus? These are experiments involving humans. Are you just asking for poorly designed experiments?

What you're asking for is companies to launch once and never know if it worked. And indeed, software used to be like that, and it sucked...

> Feature experiments are also a thing that exists. I want to deploy a new widget, and need to check that it works, and hasn't done something unexpected that drives users away. Experiments are how you do it.

Experiments and experiments on live non-consenting users are two different things.

> How about these: Are corner stores allowed to experiment with pricing? Are restaurants allowed to experiment with new menus? These are experiments involving humans. Are you just asking for poorly designed experiments?

Let a corner store charge different people different prices and let me know how far you get. The also have to deal with consequences fro their experiments, if a customer sees the price of an item has double in an experiment they're unlikely to come back, there's an asymmetry issue and not coming back is often not an option you have in an environment with lock-in and network effects.

> What you're asking for is companies to launch once and never know if it worked. And indeed, software used to be like that, and it sucked...

Yes, developers had to think through design decisions, stick to well defined HIG's and use controlled test groups, truly a dark age.

> Let a corner store charge different people different prices and let me know how far you get.

Well, under your proposal they can’t know how far they’ll get.

> Yes, developers had to think through design decisions, stick to well defined HIG's and use controlled test groups

Well, did they? To a greater extent than today?

Explicit consent is already given for feature changes just by using the site. How does the act of gathering scientifically valid information on those features substantively change the dynamic such that extra consent is required? It doesn't seem to me that it does.

These mega websites should probably be held to a different standard to the rest. No ones life is changing when I try out different colors but some of the stuff facebook is testing is very unethical.

I think the standard shouldn't be size, but type of software. Facebook is a platform. People expect (reasonably or not) some element of stability in a platform. I don't want even a small platform doing tests on me and my data.

But if it's a game, or a blog? Knock yourself out, no matter how big it is.

I agree with you but personally I dont see how its so onerous for blizzard or rockstar to tell me in plain language what it intends to do with its behavior tracking (or really that its tracking my behavior at all.) For me this is about consent, and I'm willing to consent to things that I'm made aware of. I mean, I'm a software developer too, I know there are legitimate use-cases here.

This: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...

Which is to say, some tech companies think that A/B experiments that might lead someone to commit suicide is okay.

The alternative is to not know at all that this is possible and accidentally design something that makes people more negative.

Knowing this is possible and how to measure the effect, lets them detect when they accidentally do it and reverse course.

Making it illegal to figure out the negative impacts of your decisions will make it harder to avoid them.

It would be much better to require disclosure when these negative impacts are detected and require that this information can only ever be used in the best interest of the user.

Please find me one real scientist who would argue it's ethical to encourage some people to commit suicide to find out how to avoid encouraging people to commit suicide.

Just because the outcome of the research is potentially valuable doesn't mean it's ethical to conduct it on people, especially without their consent.

More accurately, expose people in a controlled setting to what they're already being exposed to, to find out its impact. But this sounds pretty neutral.

I wholly disagree. Facebook only shows some posts algorithmically, and emotionally, they were probably more or less neutral. They chose to expose some people to predominantly sad and depressing posts, which is not "what they're already being exposed to", and it's without the more positive posts to balance it out.

They explicitly created a situation to depress people, which could definitely increase the likelihood of suicide, particularly if they happened to randomly select someone who already was predisposed to that for other reasons.

I would argue someone at Facebook should've been brought up on criminal charges for this "experiment".

>Facebook only shows some posts algorithmically, and emotionally, they were probably more or less neutral.

I'm assuming you mean in aggregate?

> They chose to expose some people to predominantly sad and depressing posts, which is not "what they're already being exposed to"

Can you source your "predominantly" here?

If their algorithm is operating randomly, it stands to reason that some amount of people will get a "predominantly" negative feed from time to time. So in this sense, some people were unwittingly being exposed to a predominately negative feed. So it seems reasonable to understand the results of this.

If their experiment resulted in people seeing negativity far beyond what is a possible outcome from their algorithm, then you might have a point about it being unethical.

> I would argue someone at Facebook should've been brought up on criminal charges for this "experiment".

What criminal law did they violate? Or are you saying there should have been a law against what they did?

Criminal Negligence/Manslaughter. You don't have to break a specific law, you just you have to be culpable in something that could foresee-ably have a reasonable chance for someone to be harmed.

Criminally negligent homicide, and manslaughter are specific laws. Conviction generally requires proof that the subject's actions were the proximate cause (a legal term with its own case law) of the victim's death.

I'm aware of only one case where someone was convicted of such a crime in the US without being physically involved in the death: Michelle Carter, who directly and repeatedly encouraged her boyfriend to kill himself, and goaded him into continuing what was ultimately a successful suicide attempt when he started to back out. Despite her active encouragement and unambiguous intent, the legal theory was controversial and the case has seen multiple appeals.

I find it quite unlikely that a court will accept the argument that intentionally making someone sad is the proximate cause of their death by suicide, even if done to a large number of people at the same time. Were that argument accepted, it could be applied to other situations affecting the emotions of many people just as easily, such as producing a sad song or movie.

Indeed. And note that these laws are generally state laws in the US, not federal. So just in the US, there's a lot of possible versions of the law/jurisdiction Facebook could face.

I didn't think if that, the jurisdiction would be where the person died, so potentially anywhere in the world with an extradition treaty could charge them.

If their feature A is OK to do in isolation, and could conceivably lead someone to commit suicide, then I don't see the problem with measuring that impact vs some feature B.