Facebook can make you happy...if Mark Zuckerberg wants you to be - Comment - Voices - The Independent
To control a nation, you need to control its news. George Orwell knew it, Joseph Stalin knew it and now Facebook knows it.
The social network secretly carried out an experiment on hundreds of thousands of its users in 2012, attempting to manipulate their moods for a psychological experiment. It found that it was able to make users happy or sad by altering the amount of positive or negative content that appeared in their News Feed.
Outrage over the results played out, ironically, on social media when they were released. One of the researchers tried to justify the experiment, saying they wanted to investigate “the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out.” And there was self-interest at stake too: Facebook were concerned that friends' negativity might lead people to leave the site.
There can be nothing ethical about an experiment that tries to make people unhappy without their consent, and without any real way of monitoring their mental health. Yet putting the ethics of the research to one side, consider how utterly terrifying it would be to live in a world where social media controls how you feel.
Well, you already do.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/facebook-can-make-you-happyif-mark-zuckerberg-wants-you-to-be-9575686.html