[brainsareneat]

I wonder where the line is between A/B testing and 'psychological experimentation' and when it's been crossed. Was it crossed just because it was published in PNAS? The outraged don't seem to think so.

What if I'm Amazon or Yelp, and I want to choose review snippets? Is looking for emotionally charged ones and testing to see how that impacts users wrong?

What if it's more direct psychological manipulation? What if I run a productivity app, and I want to see how giving people encouraging tips, like 'Try starting the day by doing one thing really well.' impacts their item completion rate. I'm doing psychological experimentation. I'm not getting my users' permission. But I am helping them. And it's a valid question - maybe these helpful tips actually end up hurting users. I should test this behavior, not just implement it wholesale.

It seems like Facebook had a valid question, and they didn't know what the answer was. Did they go wrong when they published it in PNAS? Or was it wrong to implement the algorithm in the first place? I don't think it was.

[kevingadd]

The main indications that a line was crossed are the combination of a blatantly questionable hypothesis ('we can make people depressed or unhappy') with an intentional lack of informed consent & a huge set of test subjects.

If you're doing medical testing in order to roll something out as a pharmaceutical for prescription use or over-the-counter sales, the tests are rolled out in stages, with initial testing being done on a very small number of patients under extreme scrutiny, and even that is only done after the medication has been vetted carefully using animal models. It's extremely important to avoid harming your test subjects.

In comparison, they basically went full-steam on this experiment on hundreds of thousands of people despite the fact that emotional manipulation of this sort is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. When I say extremely dangerous I mean potentially life-threatening.