Social Media giant Facebook plans to introduce a much stricter review policy of requests to access information about its users, following the uproar caused by the news about a psychological experiment being conducted on them without their knowledge in 2012, Reuters reports. The requests made by researchers for information – no matter if they are for research, academic or internal works purposes – that deal with personal content or specific groups of people will be reviewed in a more strict manner, according to Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer. The new guidelines for this matter were not yet elaborated.
According to a blog post published on Facebook’s newsroom yesterday, the social media giant does research in a variety of fields, including user experience, systems infrastructure, artificial intelligence and social science. The purpose of this work is to understand what Facebook should build and how it should build it, Schroepfer writes.
We believe in research, because it helps us build a better Facebook. Like most companies today, our products are built based on extensive research, experimentation and testing.
The psychological experiment conducted through Facebook was based on a suggestion that if people saw positive posts from their Facebook friends, it made them feel bad. Facebook recognized the importance of knowing if this assertion was valid. The suggestion was made in 2011, and the results of the study were published earlier this year. It was for done with good intentions, but nobody was prepared for the uproar that followed.
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Following the negative feedback from its users, Facebook has decided to create guidelines for its internal and external research data requests, based on the “closer look” it took on the way research is done inside the company. The new framework that was introduced yesterday will provide clear guidelines to researchers, a privacy cross-functional review panel for products and research, a training program for Facebook engineers and others doing research, and a dedicated website – research.facebook.com – for all published academic research from the company.