[adotjdotr]

"Facebook does emotional experiments on you without your direct knowledge or any outside influence. Facebook has been hell-bent on testing to see if it can make hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously depressed. They can do that and they are proud of it."

Evidence please?

There was one test conducted with 600-700k users (out of 2 billion plus). This is negligible and honestly not statistically significant enough.

Plenty of reasonable concerns around political advertising, bad actors, transparancy into who is funding / buying ads are largely things to be concerned about.

However, errant ranting as above is not exactly helpful to this debate.

Also calling $FB not successful is laughable? On what grounds can you actually say this?

There is almost no evidence that the ad product actually influenced america (it was more likely TV). If you need to be educated about advertising i'm happpy to help you here but as someone who does this for a living I can categorically tell you this - the ads did not sway the election based on the pseudo-science bullshit from Wylie, Nix and anyone else in CA.

[cgriswald]

Your post is one of the more bizarre things I have read on HN.

On the one hand, you ask for evidence. On the other hand, you admit it happened?

Then you suggest that it is not important because it is "not statistically significant enough", as if the numbers you mentioned aren't staggering? That's a bit like saying it wouldn't be significant if Rhode Island fell into the Atlantic because it only affects a tiny percent of people on Earth. Is statistical significance the only significance there is...?

[aylmao]

The study, for anyone interested:

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full

A comment on the study itself, if you're here just for discussion around Facebook please move on:

I think the results of these study are not necessarily surprising. Perhaps the most intriguing bit is this:

> This observation, and the fact that people were more emotionally positive in response to positive emotion updates from their friends, stands in contrast to theories that suggest viewing positive posts by friends on Facebook may somehow affect us negatively, for example, via social comparison (6, 13).

Which I think should be looked at more closely.

Yet, I mean, hasn't this been assumed/understood to be the case about media we consume for a while (the fact it affects our emotional state?) A quick search seems to support the claim that it is widely understood that TV has the same effect [1], and I think it's been known (or at least assumed) for a while that the emotional content of other broadcasting media can have deep effect on our emotional state. During the War radio and posters were used to keep populations calm (ie, "Keep Calm and Carry On") or angry. Today Fox News, CNN (most media companies actually) try to keep you scared and mad.

I'd say in that sense the results are not very surprising, though it's interesting to think of this in the context of the internet, because internet communication is two-way and and actors are small. Rather than being a single big broadcaster reaching all nodes, social networks are more federated and clique-y. This could imply a self-enforcing network effect. If the network's collective feelings affect each individual's, it's not hard to imagine the effective reduced positivity further worsening the mood of the collective in a vicious cycle, or the opposite. The same "rich gets richer" effect should apply for positive emotions too.

Idk, I personally thing that's kinda crazy, and would like to learn more about it, where the critical points lie, and how these effects might spread across a broader network. Would the positive and negative one tend to cancel each other out?

If you look at Figure 1, I have to wonder if the difference seen in the chart on quadrant one (Positive words / Positivity reduced) being larger than the delta on the other charts means anything for this natural evolution and network effect. Is this just an artifact of the way things are measured, or does it go deeper into our psyche?

Idk, just thoughts.

[1]: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1...

[cryptoz]

Are you really justifying making hundreds of thousands of people depressed, just because they didn't make millions of people depressed? The distances people will go here to defend Facebook are literally insane.

Making even one single person depressed on purpose is 100% pure evil. Hundreds of thousands of people depressed is a massive crime against humanity. There are sources all over the internet for this. Also I do not think Facebook had 2B+ users in 2014 or so when the "study" to hurt people was done - but that doesn't matter anyway.

> This is negligible and honestly not statistically significant enough.

300,000 depressed people doesn't matter to you? It's not statistically significant? What do you even mean by this? This is literally the most offensive thing I have ever read in my life.

> Also calling $FB not successful is laughable? On what grounds can you actually say this?

Yes I am. On the grounds that it is based on revenue from stolen money, illegally gotten gains through criminal behaviour and morally wrong actions. Not only that it is dirty money driving that price up, but it's so early in FB's days it doesn't make sense to call the stock successful yet.

[dang]

For the nth time, would you please stop posting overwrought rants to HN? Few people would disagree with you that this is an important topic and I imagine most of us mostly agree with your views. But that's obviously not as important as preserving this place for substantive discussion, and what you're doing breaks it badly.

We need you to stop this habit of going beyond the pale if you want to keep commenting here. We like you and don't want to ban you but if you keep ignoring our warnings and requests about breaking the site guidelines, what choice are we going to have? So please fix this.

In case it helps, here is how I have tried to fix this in my own case: (1) notice when my system is agitated; (2) don't post until I am less agitated; (3) go over my comment after it's up and edit out any leftovers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html