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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 philplckthun on Saturday April 17, 2021 @04:58PM (#26847397)
To be fair, since this has been a while ago it's hard to tell what to do about this. Personally I find it hard to draw any conclusions from this just due to the time that has passed. I don't use Facebook, so maybe it's just my distance from it. But it has happened and it's worth stating that this is basically a psychological experiment and not a simple A/B test, but at a company that most likely at the time didn't have an ethics board to review this.

Other sources list a couple of principles behind the ethics of psychological research. The relevant ones being:

- Minimise the risk of harm - Obtain informed consent

Some of them do state that the latter isn't always exactly possible, since that may influence the outcome.

But the fact of the matter is that Facebook did an A/B test that could inflect serious harm on the quality of life of the participants, who weren't aware of any research being conducted. The latter sounds like it'd be at least the minimum here.

So, I'm not a psychologist, but this does sound like it shouldn't have happened in this way. There were definitely more ethical ways in running this experiment that wouldn't have involved 700K unknowing and potentially unwilling participants.

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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by emodendroket on Saturday April 17, 2021 @05:03PM (#26847432)
Let's imagine hypothetically that sad, negative posts get more engagement by whatever metric Facebook uses, and Facebook was paying no attention to sentiments at all and ending up putting more sad posts on feeds. Would that have been unethical? I can't really see what would be so different.
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by alfl on Saturday April 17, 2021 @05:18PM (#26847543)
Is it unethical to create an automated system that maximizes global unhappiness for profit?
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by erik_seaberg on Saturday April 17, 2021 @05:33PM (#26847627)
When a movie makes the audience sad, it wins Oscars, we don't censor it. Why should the rules be different for Facebook?
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by tobr on Saturday April 17, 2021 @06:39PM (#26848065)
That is a banal comparison. When a film makes you sad, you are aware of what is going on. If you are unusually sensitive to these types of emotions, you can read about the film ahead of time to see if you might want to avoid it.
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by emodendroket on Saturday April 17, 2021 @06:53PM (#26848151)
Do you typically go read a synopsis of the entire plot of a film, including any surprise developments, before watching it?
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by tobr on Sunday April 18, 2021 @02:28AM (#26850284)
No?
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by emodendroket on Sunday April 18, 2021 @07:24AM (#26851558)
Ok. Then what you’re saying doesn’t make sense.
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by tobr on Sunday April 18, 2021 @12:57PM (#26854133)
Why?
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by emodendroket on Sunday April 18, 2021 @03:01PM (#26855297)
Because films’ promotions may deliberately conceal information about tragic events in the story to achieve maximum impact and nobody thinks that is unethical.
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by tobr on Sunday April 18, 2021 @04:32PM (#26856051)
This feels a lot like talking to Eliza. Your replies very vaguely connect to what’s being discussed in this thread, but there’s just no substance or coherency to the argument.
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by emodendroket on Sunday April 18, 2021 @05:42PM (#26856706)
"When a film makes you sad you are aware of what's going on" is your claim, but I don't see how that applies to something like, say, Terminator 2, whose entire goal, according to Cameron, was "making the audience cry for the Terminator," yet was not promoted as a sad film. It's hard to come up with a principled difference here.
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by tobr on Monday April 19, 2021 @09:00AM (#26862240)
The Terminator 2 audience knows the film is an authored fictional story. It can make someone cry when they didn’t expect it, but they understand that the filmmakers are intentionally trying to provoke certain emotions. If you can’t see the myriad principled differences between that situation, and logging onto Facebook expecting to see an unfiltered selection of posts, I really can’t believe you are trying hard.
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by emodendroket on Monday April 19, 2021 @10:40PM (#26870164)
If you'll scroll up a bit you'll see this subthread begins when I propose a thought experiment where the "natural" order yields the same results and ask if it's unethical, and people tell me that yes, they think it is. But now you're specifically calling attention to an unmet expectation of "unfiltered" posts (I'd question whether anyone has such an expectation, although the specifics of the curation are not advertised). I think this gets away from what I was talking about in the first place.
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by pizza on Saturday April 17, 2021 @05:50PM (#26847744)
It's hard to get a lot of positive reinforcement by interacting with like-minded others at scale through a movie. Facebook's original stated intent was to study contagion of emotion, which seems to me to suggest a multiplayer, interactive effect.
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by emodendroket on Saturday April 17, 2021 @05:51PM (#26847748)
Well, if so the problem goes a bit deeper than Facebook.
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by tobr on Saturday April 17, 2021 @05:19PM (#26847548)
Yes, that would be deeply unethical. And to make matters worse, I believe that’s a fairly accurate description of how Facebook works.
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by emodendroket on Saturday April 17, 2021 @05:51PM (#26847753)
So how could someone ethically run social media of any stripe?
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by bryan_w on Saturday April 17, 2021 @08:50PM (#26848819)
Exactly, we have no idea if HN is supressing positive stories in an experiment or not. Twitter, reddit, FB, tictok all sort content by magic and could be trying to make you sad.
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by tobr on Saturday April 17, 2021 @06:25PM (#26847976)
I don’t understand how this question can follow. Are you suggesting that social media simply must optimize for engagement and not pay attention to negative consequences?
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Re:Facebook deliberately made people sad. This ought to be t... by emodendroket on Saturday April 17, 2021 @06:52PM (#26848147)
What does that mean? Like, we want the Facebook mods to delete anything that's too depressing? Sounds more dystopian rather than less... and I thought we were supposed to be worried about "duck syndrome" where everyone appears to be having great lives, making you feel bad, because you don't see the negatives (like a duck paddling underwater, see?).
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