Facebook Secretly Conducted Tests To Manipulate Users

Facebook just keeps getting more and more evil.  Just when you believe that we've seen it all come a report that Facebook has been secretly conducting experiments on users to see if they could manipulate our moods.

As the report states, Facebook used almost 700,000 of its members as guinea pigs to see if they had the power to manipulate their emotions.

They spent one week in January of 2012 showing some people mostly negative posts from their friends and filtering out the good ones.  They also showed some people mostly positive posts and filtered out the negative ones.

Then they monitored those people to see how it affected them.  Did the people who mostly saw negative stuff become bummed out and post more negative stuff themselves?  Did the people who saw positive stuff become happier?

Fortunately, they found they can't manipulate our emotions!  In fact, they found that there was no connection between the posts people saw and how their moods changed.

And if you were wondering if the secret study might be illegal - it wasn't.  The study was technically legal, because users give permission to Facebook to do stuff like this by being a member of their site.

In fact, we only know about the study because Facebook just published a paper on it.  But still - not cool Facebook!!

Source: The Atlantic