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Adam D. I. Kramer in Floyd, ViA June 29 at 4:05pm OK so. A lot of people have asked me about my and Jamie and Jeff's recent study published in PNAS, and I wanted to give a brief public explanation. The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product. e felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends' negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook. We didn't clearly state our motivations in the paper Regarding methodology, our research sought to investigate the above claim by very minimally deprioritizing a small percentage of content in News Feed (based on whether there was an emotional word in the post) for a group of people (about 0.04% of users, or 1 in 2500) for a short period (one week, in early 2012). Nobody's posts were "hidden," they just didn't show up on some loads of Feed. Those posts were always visible on friends' timelines, and could have shown up on subsequent News Feed loads. And we found the exact opposite to what was then the conventional wisdom: Seeing a certain kind of emotion (positive) encourages it rather than suppresses is And at the end of the day, the actual impact on people in the experiment was the minimal amount to statistically detect itthe result was that people produced an average of one fewer emotional word, per thousand words, over the following week. The goal of all of our research at Facebook is to learn how to provide a better service. Having written and designed this experiment myself, I can tell you that our goal was never to upset anyone. I can understand why ome people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety While we've always considered what research we do carefully, we (not just me, several other researchers at Facebook) have been working on improving our internal review practices. The experiment in question was run in early 2012, and we have come a long way since then. Those review practices will also incorporate what we've learned from the reaction to this paper Like Comment Share Alex Leavitt, Brian Ries and 756 others like this. 644 shares View previous comments 50 of 142

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FACEBOOK SHOULDNT CHOOSE WHAT STUFF THEY 5HOW US TO CONDUCT UNETHICAL PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH. THEY SHOULD ONLY MAKE THOSE DECISIONS BASED ON UH. HOWEVER THEY WERE DOING IT BEFORE JHICH UAS PROBABLY ETHICAL, RIGHT?
Clay Johnson @cjoh Follow In the wake of both the Snowden stuff and the Cuba twitter stuff, the Facebook "transmission of anger" experiment is terrifying. Reply Retweet ★ Favorite More RETWEETS FAVORITES 152 62 9:43 AM-28 Jun 2014
Erin Kissane @kissane Follow Get off Facebook. Get your family off Facebook. If you work there, quit. They're f------ awful. わReply t Retweet * Favorite More RETWEETS FAVORITES 541 543 11:33 PM-27 Jun 2014
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Uploaded Jul 01, 2014 at 04:09PM EDT

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Facebook Emotional Contagion Experiment

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