I'm pretty sure

[mme_hardy]

that Facebook's recent manipulation of its customers wouldn't pass any ethics review board known to man.  How good that it's private enterprise doing research on non-consenting participants,  especially research that might harm its participants.  I would love to know how Cornell and UCal's committees passed this, or if they were even consulted.

In an study with academics from Cornell and the University of California, it filtered users' "news feeds" – the constant flow of comments, videos, pictures and web links that are prompted by other users in their social network. In one test, exposure to friends' "positive emotional content" was reduced, resulting in less subsequent positive posts of their own, and in another exposure to "negative emotional content" was reduced and the opposite happened. It concluded: "Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks."

Edit:  direct link to study.

In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence  our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.

Comments

[mme_hardy]

Google's IPO was carefully set up so that the founders would always have a majority of the voting stock; I don't know if Facebook followed suit, but I wouldn't be surprised.