News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be the final straw (2012). Parent comment

Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by chatmasta on Saturday April 17, 2021 @04:25PM (#26847173)
I admit I didn’t read the article because I thought I knew the event it was referring to, but didn’t Facebook actually publish this as a psychology study? i.e. they didn’t just use it for A/B testing features but actually thought they were doing something “good” to the point of publishing a study about it. It’s laughable now lol.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by cryptoz on Saturday April 17, 2021 @04:28PM (#26847184)
Yes, they published the paper and publicly bragged about how successful they were in making hundreds of thousands of people feel sad.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by wpietri on Saturday April 17, 2021 @04:42PM (#26847286)
Agreed. If people end up surprised about what they nominally consented to, it's not informed consent. Another example of Facebook's "move fast and break people" ethos.
[ Parent | on HN ]