Hot on the heels of its sweeping apology to the LGBT community, Facebook has apologized to its members for conducting emotional experiments on them. You may recall that back in June,
the social networking site found itself in hot water for conducting a
study in which it filled some News Feeds with positive posts and
some with negative posts to see whether it impacted the tone of these
people’s subsequent posts. It was essentially a test of emotion
virality.
The backlash from that study
caught Facebook by surprise, and it scrambled to respond to its users’
anger at becoming de facto guinea pigs. It was an important learning
moment for the company. “We were unprepared for the reaction the paper
received when it was published and have taken to heart the comments and
criticism,” Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer wrote Thursday. “It is clear
now that there are things we should have done differently.”
Along with its apology, Facebook
elaborated on how it will conduct such research in the future. It has
introduced guidelines for how user studies will occur, a formal review
process internally for studies of sensitive topics like emotions and a public-facing website to keep people informed on the experiments Facebook is running.
It’s not clear from the post
whether there will be any external policing of Facebook’s tests by
unbiased third parties. I’ve reached out for comment and will update
this if I hear back.
Facebook says its internal study
review team will be comprised of lawyers, engineers, and privacy
experts. That sounds hunky-dory, but outside accountability matters,
since anyone who works for Facebook may be too close to the company to
accurately determine ethical practices. For academic researchers, there
are clear ways of doing things determined by industry organizations,
external review boards, and even federal law.
It’s a step in the right
direction for the company, but without additional systems to hold
Facebook accountable, it’s not quite enough..
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