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Facebook experiment without user knowledge causes controversy.
In January 2012, Facebook embarked on a secret experiment to see how emotional contagion affected users of the popular social media site. Unfortunately, they didn’t offer the 600,000 users in the experiment the option to participate or not. Leaning on the “terms and conditions” agreement that members must sign in order to join the site, they felt that because they used computers to mine data and no humans were involved (except for the unwitting human guinea pigs whose “news feeds” were hacked), their experiment was within legal bounds. In comparison, participants in studies and various forms of research are usually made aware they are participating, even if they don’t know the exact parameters of the experiment and its intended outcomes.
Of interest to science and advertisers, it was found in the Facebook experiment that when the content of an individual’s website was edited to include mostly negative posts, then that user tended to create their own negative posts. When the reverse was done and more positive posts were featured, users posted their own more positive thoughts. The end result showing that the content of Facebook has emotional impact and humans are not immune to being influenced by it (Harriet Alexander, “Facebook Conducted Secret Psychology Experiments On Users’ Emotions,” The Daily Telegraph at Telegraph.co.uk, June 28, 2014).
The sheer quantity of information accumulated through the inception and growth of the Internet can make individual rights to personal information seem unimportant or even impossible, but personal identity is personal property, regardless. Many nations are facing the prospect of developing legislation that protects individual property and identity, even on the Internet.
Facebook’s actions are a reminder that as technology complicates life, we have to return to the source of truth to re-condition our minds in God’s way of life and spend time in the scriptures of the Bible!
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