[philplckthun]

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.

[emodendroket]

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.

[alfl]

Is it unethical to create an automated system that maximizes global unhappiness for profit?

[erik_seaberg]

When a movie makes the audience sad, it wins Oscars, we don't censor it. Why should the rules be different for Facebook?

[tobr]

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.

[emodendroket]

Do you typically go read a synopsis of the entire plot of a film, including any surprise developments, before watching it?

[tobr]

No?

[pizza]

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.

[emodendroket]

Well, if so the problem goes a bit deeper than Facebook.

[tobr]

Yes, that would be deeply unethical. And to make matters worse, I believe that’s a fairly accurate description of how Facebook works.

[emodendroket]

So how could someone ethically run social media of any stripe?

[bryan_w]

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.

[tobr]

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?

[emodendroket]

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?).