Everything We Know About Facebook's Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment

Updated, 09/08/14 Facebook’s News Feed—the main list of status updates, messages, and photos you see when you open Facebook on your computer or phone—is not a perfect mirror of the world. But few users expect that Facebook would change their News Feed in order to manipulate their emotional state. We now know that’s exactly what happened two years ago. This tinkering was just revealed as part of a new study, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The experiment is almost certainly legal. In the wake of both the Snowden stuff and the Cuba twitter stuff, the Facebook "transmission of anger" experiment is terrifying. — Clay Johnson (@cjoh) June 28, 2014 Get off Facebook. We’re tracking the ethical, legal, and philosophical response to this Facebook experiment here. This research was conducted for a single week in 2012 and none of the data used was associated with a specific person’s Facebook account. And on Sunday afternoon, Adam D.I. The first?

Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks Happiness and other emotions spread between people in direct contact, but it is unclear whether massive online social networks also contribute to this spread. Here, we elaborate a novel method for measuring the contagion of emotional expression. With data from millions of Facebook users, we show that rainfall directly influences the emotional content of their status messages, and it also affects the status messages of friends in other cities who are not experiencing rainfall. For every one person affected directly, rainfall alters the emotional expression of about one to two other people, suggesting that online social networks may magnify the intensity of global emotional synchrony. Figures Citation: Coviello L, Sohn Y, Kramer ADI, Marlow C, Franceschetti M, et al. (2014) Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks. Editor: Renaud Lambiotte, University of Namur, Belgium Received: September 20, 2013; Accepted: January 29, 2014; Published: March 12, 2014 Introduction Results