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Chronicles

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Facebook Doesn't Understand The Fuss About Its Emotion Manipulation Study

* Updated with an additional statement from Adam Kramer, the Facebook data scientist who conducted the study.  —  This weekend, the Internet discovered a study published earlier this month in an academic journal …

Forbes Kashmir Hill

Context & Ripple Effects

The study at issue was published earlier this month with Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer among its authors, and the company's response this weekend — that it doesn't understand the fuss — extends a familiar pattern: Facebook presenting research about its own product on its own terms, as when it argued in June 2012 that the ads it didn't even sell worked great. The difference now is who was experimented on.

The story has travelled unusually far for an academic paper: same-day pickups include the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Verge, Engadget, Techdirt, the Cornell Chronicle (one author's institution), and Facebook's own channels — meaning the dismissal itself is being read against a backdrop of broad press scrutiny rather than contained within it.

First-order effects

  • Kramer and his co-authors bear the immediate reputational cost: his additional statement over the weekend makes the individual researcher, not just the company, the public face of the experiment, and institutional collaborators such as Cornell face renewed questions about how the study cleared ethical review.

Second-order effects

  • Facebook's dismissive framing raises the stakes for every future publication drawn from its News Feed experiments: academic partners who want access to its data will be judged by whether their work can survive this kind of backlash, pushing Facebook toward tighter control over what gets published.

Third-order effects

  • If the pattern holds, the collision between platform-scale A/B testing culture — where experimenting on users is routine operations — and public expectations of consent will force either formal disclosure regimes or regulator involvement in how consumer internet companies run human-subjects research.

The trend: Consumer internet platforms are moving from quietly instrumenting their users as research subjects toward contested, public negotiations over consent and disclosure in human-subjects experimentation.

Related: Facebook · Adam Kramer · Perception Infrastructure · Facebook Says the Facebook Ads It Didn't Sell Work Great

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