Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein imagines a man who realizes he can accomplish something extraordinary. And then learns the moral distance between “can” and “should.” The wizards behind Facebook have veered into Frankenstein territory. To their credit, they’ve admitted it.
The world now knows that Facebook performed a secret experiment: Researchers manipulated the emotional content of the posts that 689,003 Facebook users saw on their news feed and concluded those changes affected the content of the users’ own posts.
If the effect is real — and there are already scientists who say it isn’t — the experiment appears to violate ethical guidelines for psychological, sociological and medical research.
It’s the sort of result that cries out for legal protection against researchers with more power than judgment. On Sunday, the lead researcher posted (to Facebook of course) that: “In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.”
The anxiety is due to a paper published a week or so ago in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. (For reasons known only to the gods of Internet virality, public attention to the work suddenly exploded over the weekend.) The title: “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks.” The lead researcher is Adam D.I. Kramer of Facebook’s Core Data Science Team.
“We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.”
During one week in January 2012, some people had emotionally positive posts pulled from their news feed. Some had emotionally negative posts removed. The result: Posts by people whose news feed got less positive became slightly less positive. And vice versa.
And Facebook did it without warning. It’s not hard to imagine that one or more of that 689,003 were emotionally fragile that week. Could their response to Facebook’s manipulation have nudged them into doing harm to themselves or others? If I were a lawyer with a client to whom something bad happened the week of Jan. 11, 2012, I’d be planning my legal steps.
The American Psychological Association, the American Sociological Association and the World Medical Association are among the organizations that have ethical guidelines for research on humans. Key in all of them is “informed consent.”
Almost always, the subject must be advised about risks, discomfort or potential adverse effects. Facebook did exactly none of that.
Facebook’s initial defense was to refer to its Data Use Policy “to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research.”
Here’s what the seldom-read policy says: “[W]e may use the information we receive about you: for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.”
That’s a blanket approval for volunteering for psychological manipulation? Seriously?
In his mea culpa, Kramer seems to agree Facebook’s standards need a debug and reboot: “The experiment in question was run in early 2012, and we have come a long way since then. Those review practices will also incorporate what we’ve learned from the reaction to this paper.”
And, he said, the effect that was measured was extremely small, “the minimal amount to statistically detect it.” But imagine even a small change in the emotional state of Facebook’s more than 1 billion users. What if Mark Zuckerberg decides he wants the whole world to be a little happier next week? Or a littler sadder? New review protocols can’t make us unknow that Facebook may have this power.
As Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein put it: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge.”
Dallas Morning News writer Jeffrey Weiss may be contacted at email@example.com.