Everything We Know About Facebook’s Secret Mood-Manipulation Experiment - The Atlantic

It was probably legal. But was it ethical?

Updated, 09/08/14 Facebook’s News Feed—the main list of status updates, messages, and photos you see when you open Facebook on your computer or phone—is not a perfect mirror of the world. But few users expect that Facebook would change its News Feed in order to manipulate their emotional state. We now know that’s exactly what happened two years ago. For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700,000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadd

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