What makes you think that Facebook even considers the moral impact of its actions?

It's not so much that they care about the moral impact of their actions, as that society might backlash them if they're not too careful. Large != untouchable.

I wish I'd thought of a better word to use than "morally," though, since it didn't quite capture what I meant to say. I meant, people being upset about their actions is hard to quantify.

Ah, I can agree with that. Facebook probably does consider its actions from a moral standpoint if only to calculate the outrage potential.

Oh, rough! A strongly worded letter from Congress. I'll read it after I finish counting all my money.

Hum... Facebook has some large experiments on mood analysis and manipulation on their knowledge base. If anybody can measure this, it's them.

What can still happen is that the campaign backfires so quickly that hey don't have time to react. I don't know their reaction time, but they've been doing mood manipulation for long enough to think it's short.

It's true that not everybody forecasts everything, but I think it can be pretty precisely measured via things that they already track, like "how much does this person visit Facebook" and "based on engagement, what are their interests". They were very big on measuring factors related to growth; I'd be very surprised if they weren't measuring what causes people to leave.

It can't even really be measured economically beyond how much it costs to run the ad. They will see the result of the ad, but FB will never know how it would turn out if they didn't run it.

What effect do you think those letters will have?

It's hard to say. In the worst case, it could be a prelude to regulating AI in general.

I'm legitimately concerned it might be, if you read between the lines: https://twitter.com/RepYvetteClarke/status/13392973588158341...