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.