With all the grace and tact of a bee stuck in your car, Facebook has literally been performing secret experiments on your mind. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Facebook has been secretly manipulating the emotional states of it’s users just to see if it could (spoiler alert:it can).
“To determine whether it could alter the emotional state of its users and prompt them to post either more positive or negative content, the site’s data scientists enabled an algorithm, for one week, to automatically omit content that contained words associated with either positive or negative emotions from the central news feeds of 689,003 users.” – wsj.com
That’s interesting, and well, dangerous. Know anyone suffering from depression? Know anyone who has committed suicide? Does it comfort you to know that a corporation may have been secretly altering their mental state? I smell a lawsuit. Facebook user Jephrey Haul had this to say:
“Disable your account today and go enjoy the weekend with real people. Share this with other friends in your social network if you also hate Facebook. Facebook is a registered trademark, an online social prison, and will likely lead toward a dystopian future for your children.” – Jephrey Haul
Hmm, since Google’s formal corporate motto is “Don’t be evil.”, maybe Facebook could make theirs: “Be randomly evil to half your users, and good to the other half, as part of a sick experiment!”.
Just kidding, they’re evil to all their users…
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