A newly published paper reveals that scientists at Facebook conducted a massive psychological experiment on hundreds of thousands of users by tweaking their feeds and measuring how they felt afterward.In other words, Facebook decided to try to manipulate some people’s emotional states — for science.The research involved Facebook’s News Feed — the stream of status updates, photos and news articles that appears when you first fire up the site. For a week in January 2012, a group of researchers, variously affiliated with Facebook, Cornell University and the University of California, San Francisco, altered the algorithm that determines what shows up in News Feed for 689,003 people. One group was shown fewer posts containing words thought to evoke positive emotions, such as “love,” “nice” and “sweet,” while another…
Original Article Can Be Found Here:
You May Have Been A Lab Rat In A Huge Facebook Experiment
Also published on Medium.