News Digest

Facebook admits mood experiment ‘should have been done differently’

Facebook has admitted that a controversial mood experiment “should have been done differently”. The US technology firm teamed up with two universities to secretly alter the news feeds of 700,000 users as part of the study, which explored “emotional contagion”. The algorithm which controls users’ feeds was tampered with in order to find out how the changes affect their moods. The study provoked outrage from people concerned about the privacy implications. Now Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer has admitted the site was “unprepared” for the negative reaction the study’s results received.

It is clear now there are things we should have done differently. For example, we should have considered other non-experimental ways to do this research.

Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer

The study took place over one week in 2012, and was conducted in conjunction with Cornell University and the University of California. Researchers wanted to see if positive or negative words in messages led to positive or negative content in users’ status updates. The findings were published in June this year. The researchers found once users had been exposed to positive or negative words in their feeds, their updates changed accordingly. Facebook says in future it will give researchers clearer guidelines, review study plans in more depth, and train their teams in privacy and security.

The research would also have benefitted from more extensive review by a wider and more senior group of people. Last, in releasing the study, we failed to communicate clearly why and how we did it.

Mike Schroepfer