Mood Manipulation: What Made Facebook Overstep Its Limits

In a digital era when loads of pertinent questions are being raised about Internet spying, social media hacking and privacy infringement, Facebook’s ‘mood manipulation experiment’ has created discomfiture for both the company and its large user base. This experiment, as Facebook terms it, has brought to the fore the gravity of the matter. Therefore, stakeholders have to seriously debate on the legal, ethical and privacy issues as social networking has moved much beyond being a ‘fun’ thing. Practices adopted by data holders require an ethical resurrection and must be made robust, keeping the end-user’s interest in mind.

This so-called experiment happened two years ago when avid Facebookers became subjects for an experiment, without their knowledge or consent. The social networking site, which has a user base amounting to that of a densely populated country (India, for instance), ran an experiment on people’s moods for one whole week in 2012. About 700,000 people saw the content that they didn’t choose; rather, it was imposed on them for seven days as the experiment was carried out via the newsfeeds provided to users. And the content they were exposed to was classified in two categories – happy and sad.

At the end of the week, Facebook studied the behaviour patterns of these individuals through their status updates and traits on the social networking site. This was done to understand the influence that the ‘mood manipulation’ experiment had on them. Whether Facebook was looking at having a ‘placebo effect or a boomerang’ would never be known because when FB was questioned by the media, the response was none too clear.

Facebook’s Dr Adam Kramer, who is one of the authors of the said experiment and an in-house FB talent, focused primarily on cleaning the slate. “The actual impact of the experiment on people was the minimal amount to statistically detect it… the goal was never to upset people. In the hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety,” he said in a public message on his wall. Goal was not to upset people? Oh yes, we gotta believe that!

Actually, it would be better to look at these arguments in the light of what this experiment forced people to do and feel at the end of the day. One would definitely wonder what the objective of this experiment was. Well, the world has come a long way with gadgets and devices that have been infringing privacy. That’s why when you call a support centre, there is a recorded voice that tells you the call would be recorded for training and quality monitoring purposes. Whatever that means, one is in the ‘know’ of privacy infringement – both the user and the owner know it.

Adding to this will be the millions of experiments psychologists have conducted worldwide about the effects of positive and negative emotions on people. But those were done in a way that was ethical and the subjects were in the know – they knew it was an experiment and they could simply walk away from it if they didn’t want to offer themselves for a study. Ethically, Facebook didn’t show the same grace. None of the 700,000 users knew they were being guinea pigs for something that would be used as ‘baseline data’ at any point of time.

Understandably, the data gathered had been utilised to make Facebook more appealing, more reachable and more tangible. But when Facebook overstepped the limits, nobody knew. And everyone gave in without knowledge and consent.

It’s alarming that Facebook has shown so much of unwanted alacrity to add users to its kitty. It is also possible that more experiments are under way, which will be known only years later or might be buried forever.