The alternative is relying on intuition only and possibly making people permanently sadder. Or is there a way to achieve this knowledge consistent with the field of research ethics?
We saw this with challenge trials in the pandemic where ethicists fretted people would reject them and concluded challenge trials are immoral. Meanwhile opinion polls suggest people view challenge trials as virtuous and the current method of waiting for infections as immoral.
The real evil isn’t in the experiment, it’s that the researchers found that Facebook makes people’s lives worse. How many suicides are caused by Facebook’s investors? Whether they can mitigate it this way or that is splitting hairs.
NO, companies should not perform secret psychological experiments on people without their consent because they "could suggest how to avoid sadness."
> challenge trials in the pandemic
You mean the ones people consented to? Why is consent not an issue for you?
This is similar to claiming that traffic experiments which change the flow of cars, in term causing some people to experience more traffic and become unhappy, are unethical. Do you think traffic experiments are unethical?
Facebook definitely caused the emotions - by deliberately choosing to show particular content.
> This is similar to claiming that traffic experiments which change the flow of cars, in term causing some people to experience more traffic and become unhappy, are unethical. Do you think traffic experiments are unethical?
If the objective of the traffic experiment had been to deliberately get a certain group of cars stuck in a traffic jam, this would absolutely be unethical.
A closer analogue would be a traffic experiment designed to gauge the emotional effects of a particular route. That's an important difference.
The article itself says the experiment was designed to look for evidence of emotional contagion, which is quite different from "it was designed to make people sad".
Also, in another thread it's pointed out that the effect sizes from this study were extremely small - something like 0.3% more negative words were used by ~150k people. The effect is said to be on the same scale as any minor UI change, like a size/color change of the "like" button. So it's hard to see this as anything other than folks looking for a reason to get outraged.
That was their research goal, yes. Their methodology was this:
> For some, that meant 90% of all "positive" posts were removed from their newsfeed for a week, rendering the social network a pit of despair.
Research can be unethical even if the intention of the research is not.
For the traffic analogy, if part of that traffic experiment would involve a routing change that researchers know will likely cause a traffic jam, then the experiment will be unethical, no matter how warranted the research may be.
That's the reason you cannot use placebos to test life-saving medication (without prior informed consent), even though it would certainly be beneficial for science if you could.
And in Facebook's case, their research goal wasn't even that ethical in the first place. Maye we can have this talk if they try to find a cure for depression through emotional manipulation, but this was literally just about preventing people from leaving Facebook:
> "At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends' negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook."
Protection of clinical trial subjects
Clinical trials on minors
Clinical trials on incapacitated adults not able to give informed legal
Establishment of mandatory Ethics Committees
There is a massive difference in studying and directing traffic to help make traffic flow better. The goal there is to improve driving for everyone. Facebook's goal is to intentionally make people unhappy for the sole purpose of making more money.
If their current process was already suspected to be the worse of the two, and their goal was to improve peoples' moods per se, what is the ethical thing to do? Keep people feeling more sad?
Or, perhaps, stop being algorithmic in what people see, or else put people in full control of simple sorting (prioritize my "starred" category and sort by date)?
When you have an improved algorithm, would you change your algorithm all at once for everybody, or would you test your change on small % of users, before you go full-scale? You'd do the latter. There's no better option. Because if you're wrong, your impact is much more devastating.
In other words, there's always an algorithm filtering your feed. If that was unethical, it makes Facebook unethical by merely existing.
This is not a "public service" - it's a for-profit company.
> When you have an improved algorithm,
This is not an "improved algorithm". They deliberately removed almost all positive news from some people's feeds for a week.
That said, anyone who signs up for a job at Facebook doesn't give a shit about ethical design of experiments.
There was a specific task force at Facebook intended to better understand customer psychology. Came from them.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-...
I did read the whole article, and that doesn't excuse the BS clickbait title of "Facebook deliberately made people sad."
I find the fact that the article is complaining about emotional manipulation by Facebook, while using a deliberately manipulative title, to be more than a tad ironic.
Further, the article you link appears to have commentary by a single researcher.
Here’s a writeup by researcher who thinks it wasn’t unethical at all and that it would have passed IRB as performed. It, of course, does not end the discussion, but it does demonstrate that the issue is more complex than a company deliberately making people sad:
https://hbr.org/2014/07/were-okcupids-and-facebooks-experime...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/media-values-...
And "the journalist is relaying" is a poor excuse - the journalist has a choice of what to relay and how to frame it, and this choice is routinely used to frame things in a specific way. There's no "just reporting" anymore, if there ever was. There's always a reason why something is reported (or not reported, as it happens) and there's always a reason why something is reported in a specific way. The choice and control is always on the press's side.
> "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/111/24/8788.full.pdf
Edit: And it is in their public defense of this paper that they think we all gave 'informed consent' to this kind of psychological manipulation when we signed up for Facebook because it's in the TOS.
They literally define 'informed consent' as the legal text in their TOS. I mean that's insane, they know their users don't read that before signing up. It's not f'ing informed or consent ugh this makes me so mad.
Also what kind of sick company puts into their TOS that they can emotionally manipulate you on purpose whenever they want? Fucked up.
Which would be correct, surely?
If this is the hypothesis they are testing for, the problem is they subjected people to a psychological experiment without consenting to it, for the ultimate purpose of their own financial gain.
How is that not malicious intent?
I don't think facebook engineers or data scientists care what people feel when they're adjusting their models, they only care about time spent on their platform or some other overly reductionist metric. One could argue that chasing super-efficiency will always result in abominations, but I think its hard to say that someone is doing something imoral by just doing the human equivalent of gradient descent in the optimization problem of driving engagement. That's not to say that we shouldn't have a conversation about this and not figure out ways to make these super efficient and powerful companies find ways to be satisfied with organic engagement.
What if an almost-suicidal person got the "b" version?
A/B testing should be used when you think, in good faith, that BOTH "a" and "b" versions could be good and want to know which one works better, not to confirm a hypothesis that "b" has a negative impact on users' personal lives.
A/B tests for the case where you honestly, in good faith, think both A or B could be good designs, but you don't know which one is better.
A/B testing is for product design changes, not psychology experiments. It is NOT for the primary intention of a psychology experiment with a group of subjects that didn't consent to a study, where either A or B has a suspected negative impact on emotions, and you're using A/B testing to confirm or deny that hypothesis.
Product Person #2: Not sure, wouldn’t negative posts make people feel worse?
Product Person #1: Wow, I donno, maybe we should try adjusting additional posts people see one way a bit and see what happens?
Product Person #2: Not a bad idea, how about we try both? You know, an A/B test.
Product Person #1: Hmmm. Ok, but— when we’re done, let’s have some scientific review of our data just so that we can correct the record and push along the science around this stuff.
Journalist: This company deliberately made people sad