"Facebook tinkered with users’ feeds for a massive psychology experiment"

There is absolutely no way of knowing if you were a subject. The alteration is far too small. Lost in the noise.
 
There is absolutely no way of knowing if you were a subject. The alteration is far too small. Lost in the noise.
But from a legal standpoint, if a FB member wanted to be a pain in the a.. and know if they were chosen, is there any way for FB to give an answer on that.
 
But from a legal standpoint, if a FB member wanted to be a pain in the a.. and know if they were chosen, is there any way for FB to give an answer on that.

Depends if they stored the under ids. Probably not, and I'm pretty sure FB would not tell them anyway.
 
I'm just curious but I'm positive there were people who I was following on my news feed who had stuff not show up, only when I actually went to their content, and I remember double checking a couple times to make sure I was even following them.
 
I'm just curious but I'm positive there were people who I was following on my news feed who had stuff not show up, only when I actually went to their content, and I remember double checking a couple times to make sure I was even following them.
In the left sidebar, click the down arrow by News Feed and set it to Most Recent. They recently "improved" the news feed by basically defaulting everybody to Top Stories, which means you lose a lot of stuff from feeds with fewer followers, while ones with a lot of comments can linger near the top of the page for days.
 
In the left sidebar, click the down arrow by News Feed and set it to Most Recent. They recently "improved" the news feed by basically defaulting everybody to Top Stories, which means you lose a lot of stuff from feeds with fewer followers, while ones with a lot of comments can linger near the top of the page for days.
Gotcha, thanks. Looks like I most likely wasn't one of the lucky ~689k :rolleyes:

I wonder if other large websites might use this type of algorithm though; imagine news sites adjusting your news feed based on certain criteria.
 
Response for the study authors:
https://www.facebook.com/akramer/posts/10152987150867796

OK so. A lot of people have asked me about my and Jamie and Jeff’s recent study published in PNAS, and I wanted to give a brief public explanation. The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product. We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook. We didn’t clearly state our motivations in the paper.

Regarding methodology, our research sought to investigate the above claim by very minimally deprioritizing a small percentage of content in News Feed (based on whether there was an emotional word in the post) for a group of people (about 0.04% of users, or 1 in 2500) for a short period (one week, in early 2012). Nobody’s posts were “hidden,” they just didn’t show up on some loads of Feed. Those posts were always visible on friends’ timelines, and could have shown up on subsequent News Feed loads. And we found the exact opposite to what was then the conventional wisdom: Seeing a certain kind of emotion (positive) encourages it rather than suppresses is.

And at the end of the day, the actual impact on people in the experiment was the minimal amount to statistically detect it — the result was that people produced an average of one fewer emotional word, per thousand words, over the following week.
The goal of all of our research at Facebook is to learn how to provide a better service. Having written and designed this experiment myself, I can tell you that our goal was never to upset anyone. I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.

While we’ve always considered what research we do carefully, we (not just me, several other researchers at Facebook) have been working on improving our internal review practices. The experiment in question was run in early 2012, and we have come a long way since then. Those review practices will also incorporate what we’ve learned from the reaction to this paper.
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A lot of people have asked me about my and Jamie and Jeff’s recent study published in PNAS, and I wanted to give a brief public explanation. The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product. We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook
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bull. the guy's a freak!! I feel SO much better now. <that's sarcasm.

freak.JPG
 
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We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out.
And we found the exact opposite to what was then the conventional wisdom: Seeing a certain kind of emotion (positive) encourages it rather than suppresses is.
Where are they getting their "conventional" wisdom from if they believed seeing a positive emotion would lead to people feeling negative or left out. I don't get the thought process behind that. And to do a study to prove otherwise seems like a waste of time and money.
 
Where are they getting their "conventional" wisdom from if they believed seeing a positive emotion would lead to people feeling negative or left out. I don't get the thought process behind that. And to do a study to prove otherwise seems like a waste of time and money.
the [not intelligent] part of this Behavioral Manipulation Experiment is that it would have been legal if they just used data they already had. They could have researched the phenomenon without manipulating the posts.

I mean I guess its possible they followed the informed consent laws, we'll have to wait and see what he says on his FB thread since people are asking about that.
 
Facebook envy.

Witnessing friends' vacations, love lives and work successes on Facebook can cause envy and trigger feelings of misery and loneliness, according to German researchers.
https://secure.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/facebook-study-envy_n_2526549.html
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That's a good point Pete, but I don't see them discussing envy or jealousy. Not only that, my friends vacation all the time or do things I wish I could do but with kids makes it impossible (at least for now until they're in college). For about a split second I feel envy, but it doesn't ruin my day or make me sad. Someone winning the lottery pisses me off after I've already started spending it in my mind, but seriously who gives a crap if someone you know is succeeding in life. I can see this being more of an issue with women, no offense deirdre, but women are more prone to being jealous if their friend found the love of their life, or if their friend is having kids and they haven't yet, or if they're still single when all of their friends are married. It would be interesting if FB released more information about the research like how many women vs men were involved, demographics (I know Mick said all over, but it would be interesting to see if there was a variance in emotions from one corner of the globe to the next).

And FB isn't the first to do this type of research. I remember hearing about Apple and Siri doing something similar to this, where Siri was storing all of the information and request to help the software run better and for predictive text purposes. The public has to get used to this sort of thing because research like this isn't going away, and it's apart of our lives everyday whether we know about it or not. All of the major internet based companies and advertising companies do similar research already
 
interesting. that article came out in January this year but the study was done January 2012. bet they're kicking themselves now for releasing it. :eek:
Do you think someone in FB pressured them to release the research because of ethical reasons?
 
but women are more prone to being jealous if their friend
probably true. I don't see it with any of my friends though. but they're mostly hippy types.

and most surveyed by the german study were 20'ish.

357 respondents answered most parts of the survey (the answers were not forced). 34.2% (65.8%) of respondents were male (female). The median age com-prised 24 years. 93.8% stated Germany as the country, where they have spent most time of their life. 89.9% (3.9%) of respondents were students (employed). 25% of respondents studied language / culture studies, 7.6% studied law, with the rest study-ing a great variety of other disciplines. The median number of FB friends reached 169. 50.0% of respondents stated to spend between 5 and 30 minutes daily on FB.

http://warhol.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/~hkrasnova/Ongoing_Research_files/WI%202013%20Final%20Submission%20Krasnova.pdf
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older than I thought, the study, presented end of Feb 2013.

but found this one too from different researchers
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21583593-using-social-network-seems-make-people-more-miserable-get-life
 
Speaking of these experiments, I found this mentioning 61 million people
see, they can use available data to do their studies.

you know... if they are experimenting on negative and positive responses who's to say they aren't experimenting with paranoid emotions? maybe Facebook started the whole "chemtrail" conspiracy to see how it would spread. :(
 
That's a good point Pete, but I don't see them discussing envy or jealousy. Not only that, my friends vacation all the time or do things I wish I could do but with kids makes it impossible (at least for now until they're in college). For about a split second I feel envy, but it doesn't ruin my day or make me sad. Someone winning the lottery pisses me off after I've already started spending it in my mind, but seriously who gives a crap if someone you know is succeeding in life. I can see this being more of an issue with women, no offense deirdre, but women are more prone to being jealous if their friend found the love of their life, or if their friend is having kids and they haven't yet, or if they're still single when all of their friends are married. It would be interesting if FB released more information about the research like how many women vs men were involved, demographics (I know Mick said all over, but it would be interesting to see if there was a variance in emotions from one corner of the globe to the next).

And FB isn't the first to do this type of research. I remember hearing about Apple and Siri doing something similar to this, where Siri was storing all of the information and request to help the software run better and for predictive text purposes. The public has to get used to this sort of thing because research like this isn't going away, and it's apart of our lives everyday whether we know about it or not. All of the major internet based companies and advertising companies do similar research already

People old or wise enough to have perspective on 'success' not being affected by other's representation of life success on social media doesn't change that it is affecting some, enough for it to have been statistically interesting to social psychologists.

Watching porn probably makes some feel left out and more miserable and lonely too.

ETA
I don't see them discussing envy or jealousy.
You don't? The article says 'envy' like 10 times.
 
probably true. I don't see it with any of my friends though. but they're mostly hippy types.

and most surveyed by the german study were 20'ish.

357 respondents answered most parts of the survey (the answers were not forced). 34.2% (65.8%) of respondents were male (female). The median age com-prised 24 years. 93.8% stated Germany as the country, where they have spent most time of their life. 89.9% (3.9%) of respondents were students (employed). 25% of respondents studied language / culture studies, 7.6% studied law, with the rest study-ing a great variety of other disciplines. The median number of FB friends reached 169. 50.0% of respondents stated to spend between 5 and 30 minutes daily on FB.

http://warhol.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/~hkrasnova/Ongoing_Research_files/WI%202013%20Final%20Submission%20Krasnova.pdf
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older than I thought, the study, presented end of Feb 2013.

but found this one too from different researchers
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21583593-using-social-network-seems-make-people-more-miserable-get-life
So 94% of the participants are German, or lived in Germany at one point in their life. Why so many from one sector of the globe? Is that strange to anyone else?
 
Speaking of these experiments, I found this mentioning 61 million people :eek:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7415/abs/nature11421.html

Involves Adam D I Kramer, who was part of the pnas experiment.
Here we report results from a randomized controlled trial of political mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 US congressional elections. The results show that the messages directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behaviour of millions of people. Furthermore, the messages not only influenced the users who received them but also the users’ friends, and friends of friends. The effect of social transmission on real-world voting was greater than the direct effect of the messages themselves, and nearly all the transmission occurred between ‘close friends’ who were more likely to have a face-to-face relationship. These results suggest that strong ties are instrumental for spreading both online and real-world behaviour in human social networks.
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I'm sure politicians are very interested in this, and it's no surprise that Presidential candidates in recent running have used FB or Twitter as a platform to get their message out and get people out to vote.
 
see, they can use available data to do their studies.

you know... if they are experimenting on negative and positive responses who's to say they aren't experimenting with paranoid emotions? maybe Facebook started the whole "chemtrail" conspiracy to see how it would spread. :(
Or who's to say they aren't experimenting on getting people to like one candidate over another?
 
The OP never mentioned envy or jealous, that's what I was referring to. The Huffington Post piece you recently attached did mention it.
I posted that because were asking about the idea that positive posts on social media can create negative feelings...

Where are they getting their "conventional" wisdom from if they believed seeing a positive emotion would lead to people feeling negative or left out. I don't get the thought process behind that. And to do a study to prove otherwise seems like a waste of time and money.

The 'conventional wisdom' for that came from previous studies, which this latest one seems to contradict.


So 94% of the participants are German, or lived in Germany at one point in their life. Why so many from one sector of the globe? Is that strange to anyone else?
Because it was a German study. :p
 
When I asked for the demographics of the study early on in the thread someone, I think Mick said it was globablly..
The german study isn't the "study" FB did where they manipulated the posts people see. The german study asked permission, that's how you can tell the difference ; )

FB maybe wasn't "global" as it was English speaking only. and after perusing the Health and Human services 'studies on human" guidelines, I'm wondering if maybe they didn't bypass America all together. I don't know what the laws are in other countries regarding research subjects.
 
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