Facebook raised a lot of controversies in the last years due to the manipulation applied on English-speaking users. Its data scientists use the social website as a research lab in order to find more answers related to how users influence one another emotionally, manipulating their News Feed without their knowledge. They wanted to find out what happens when negative expressions are reduced, respectively positive ones. The results of the study revealed that a user exposed to few negative expressions tend to produce more positive ones and vice versa. This means that emotions can be transmitted from one user to another using social networks. Moreover, it also means that Facebook “researchers” can manipulate users’ information, posts and statuses in order to play with their emotions when they want and how they want, for the simple reason that users agreed with all of this when they marked off the box of Terms and Conditions.
The researchers argued that their experiment did not infringe the rights of users because users’ data can be utilized “for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement” as the terms of service reveal. In their defense, it was said that the content of the posts was never read by the scientists but instead they used the computer to count the number of positive and negative words that could be found in the posts. The experiment ran for a week in 2012 between 11th and 18th of January. Facebook used this experiment to demonstrate that having a Facebook account can make you think positive if you have friends who normally think in this way.
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The only problem which revolves around those kinds of experiments is the lack of users’ consent. Comparing Facebook’s experiments with ordinary experiments, it is easily observable that the latter ones have to be run by an ethics board to get an approval while the first ones don’t. As a repercussion, the social media companies can use the results in their favor and manipulate news feeds to create emotionally marketing opportunities. These tricks will only be advantageous for some people, while others are treated like lab subjects. A more ideal situation is the one in which Facebook requires the acceptance of users to be added in a random sociological experiment, making them aware of the consequences first. It is every users’ right to have his or her information protected and not be used to manipulate the human behavior.