[yazinsai]

This comment on the piece aptly sums up my response, it's by Sean Tucker:

Adam, I don't know you -- I came here from the Buzzfeed article criticizing the ethics of the study that linked to this post, but it appears we do have a friend in common.

I just have to ask - you honestly had a hypothesis that amounted to 'perhaps we can make people more depressed,' and decided to test it on a group that hadn't consented to the experiment, with no way to track its impact on their actual lives, only on the language they used in their Facebook posts? And you ask us to trust that this passed an internal review so it's ethical?

Please take a moment to step back and consider that. That appears to have been the train of thought that led to this.

That's appalling. Completely appalling. The Atlantic piece is right -- there's absolutely no way this passes APA deceptive research standards.

Beyond that, you'll never know what impact this actually had on depressed people. You can only measure what they posted to Facebook, which isn't a particularly meaningful or realistic indicator of their emotional state.

If this passed an internal review board, that's only proof that Facebook's internal review standards aren't what they need to be.

You're in a position of extraordinary power, with access to more subscribers than any other field study in history, a larger population than most nations, and subject only to how you review yourselves. You could deceive yourself into believing you have informed consent because everyone clicked 'accept' on the Terms of Service years ago, but there's no way even you think that's a meaningful standard.

I trust you're a reasonable person who doesn't set out to cross ethical boundaries. But on this one, I think Facebook needs to admit it did and make some changes. This study was unethical by any reasonable standard. There's nothing wrong with admitting that and figuring out a way to do better.

There's a lot wrong with going ahead with anything like this, ever again.

[zaroth]

This is Facebook. Is has a tremendous effect on peoples lives. And that's precisely why it's worth $100B. This is nothing more than a tweak in their ranking algorithm -- much larger and even targeted/dynamic modifications occur all the time. How can a reasonable person be upset by this?

If the study is unethical by any reasonable standard, does this amount to condemning the whole company, even the whole industry? Because if this is unethical, you are calling out an extremely widespread practice...

[zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC]

How can a reasonable person not be upset about someone intentionally making people feel bad without their consent?

$foodcompany recently mixed some small amounts of a known poison into their product to see how their customers would react. This is nothing more than a tweak in their recipe - much larger modifications occur all the time. How can a reasonable person be upset by this?

[nl]

I'd normally be with you in defending Facebook here, but in this case the ethics really are questionable.

They designed an experiment where there was a serious hypothesis that it could lead to depression in the people subject to it. That has the potential to be actually harmful.

I still defend Facebook's right to do research, but they need to take more care to avoid harm.

The industry as a whole doesn't perform experiments designed to depress people. There could be other unethical experiments too, but they need to be judged on a case by case basis.

[3rd3]

There is no difference between tinkering with an algorithm with the intention to negatively influence people's emotions and tinkering with an algorithm to make it work better?

[zaroth]

Who is to say those two statements are at odds with one another?

Also, almost every A/B which results in a measurable impact in user response will have done so by positively vs. negatively impacting the users' emotions on the A/B legs of the study.

But more to the point, this is not even a fair characterization of what Facebook did. The made a tweak to their ranking algorithm which they deployed to 1/2500 of their users. Much later they discovered there was a extremely small but measurable impact to those users' engagement, and the types of words they included in their subsequent posts. They actually didn't know at all ahead of time what the effect would be, and in fact the effect they observed was the opposite of the widespread expectation.