Recently the popular social network, Facebook, used the newsfeeds of their members as a place of experimentation. Facebook internally funded the study, which used Facebook users as unwitting participants to directly manipulate what appeared on their news feeds.

The point of the study was to influence the emotions of Facebook users. They tried to only allow news to go up on someone’s newsfeed of a certain emotional tone to see if it affected how the user emotionally represented themselves on Facebook. This unannounced study manipulated the newsfeeds of about 700,000 unaware Facebook users. The social media giant either filled these newsfeeds with positive or negative content to see how it affected what was being posted. This study was completely unethical because none of the “participants” consented to be just that. Also, the study did not just affect those whose news feeds were manipulated.

About 155,000 users from both of the groups tested “posted at least one status update during the experimental period” which means that all of their friends saw the status that they put on Facebook. This experiment happened over a week in 2012 and it could have made a few hundred thousand peoples days darker. It is strange and irresponsible for Facebook to randomly, without consent, make certain people only look at upsetting and negative posts for a week. This is especially troubling for those people who may be looking at Facebook and who are already in an emotionally vulnerable state or are affected by depression. When you get a Facebook account you agree to the company analyzing what you post so that they can deliver you targeted ads. However, manipulating what you see on your news feed to try and affect your emotional state and how you use Facebook is not in the contract and is pretty unethical. Facebook’s Adam Kramer, who co-authored the study has responded by stating, “at the end of the day, the actual impact on people in the experiment was the minimal amount to statistically detect it- the result was that people produced an average of one fewer emotional word, per thousand words, over the following week.”