14 DAY TRIAL // That experiment that Facebook conducted and had everyone talking about it wasn’t the only one. Of course, that’s not exactly a surprise, but it seems like anyone in the Data Science team could run whatever test they wanted.
For instance, two years ago, you may remember suddenly being locked out of Facebook because the network believed you were a robot and using a fake name. Getting back in required users to provide proof that they were real.
Thousands were involved in this experiment run by Facebook, and no one knew that everything was fake. The message was just a test that the Data Science team set up to help improve the antifraud measures and no one actually lost their accounts.
This week started out with news that Facebook had run a controversial experiment in January 2012 as it tried to figure out whether negative and positive comments on the platform affected the mood of others and thus creating an emotional contagion.
The bad part about it all is that the 700,000 people involved in the study unknowingly had their newsfeeds altered to either display positive or negative posts in order for Facebook to assess the effects.
On Wednesday, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, said that the emotion manipulation experiment was actually part of an ongoing research companies do to test different products and that everything was just poorly communicated.
“We are taking a very hard look at this process to make more improvements,” she said. The Wall Street Journal reports that this Data Science group Facebook has set up and which includes some three dozen researchers had very little boundaries, as an unnamed former member of the team said.
At the time of the controversial study, the terms everyone agreed to mentioned that the data could be used to improve Facebook’s products. Four months later, the data use agreement was modified to include mention of “research” purposes.
“There’s no review process, per se,” said Andrew Ledvina, a man who worked in the Facebook Daca Science group from February 2012 to July 2013. He mentioned that anyone on the team could run a test and they were always trying to alter peoples’ behavior.
In fact, since everyone on the team did their own tests, and they happened so fast, Ledvina mentioned that there was a fear that the anonymous users partaking in these could actually overlap. Considering there are over 1 billion Facebook users using the platform monthly, this statement begs the question – how many users are affected by each study?
The Data Science group was created back in 2007, and ever since then, it has run hundreds of tests that haven’t been disclosed. Those that have been exposed to the world talk about how families communicate, another looks into the cause of loneliness, while yet another studied the social behaviors spread through the network.