[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?

[emodendroket]

Ok. Then what you’re saying doesn’t make sense.

[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?).