The truth about Facebook: it plays with your emotions all the time
News that Facebook has been toying with its users’ emotions may shock some, but in fact it just highlights the kind of psychological exercise the social network engages in all the time.
It’s emerged hundreds of thousands of Facebookers have unwittingly been pulled into an experiment into how the social network can affect people’s mood.
In a study with two US universities, Facebook took 689,000 users and subtly tweaked what they saw in their news feed, without the users’ knowledge. Some saw more negative information, some saw more positive stuff. The results are unsurprising – those who saw negative content were more likely to post negatively themselves, and the correlation was the same among users exposed to cheerier material; they tended to be happier in their posts.
It’s the fact that the participants were not told that has sparked a furore, with a member of the Commons media select committee telling the Guardian he thinks there should be legislation to stop such techniques.
Facebook said the research was only done for a week in 2012 and none of the data collected was associated with a specific Facebook account. Adam Kramer, who did the experiment, wrote on Facebook: “Having written and designed this experiment myself, I can tell you that our goal was never to upset anyone. I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I 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.”
But the truth is that this kind of manipulation occurs all the time (albeit in a less targeted way) and is in fact the reason Facebook has become the world’s largest social network. What you see in your news feed is not an all-inclusive round-up of everything that happens to all of your friends. Facebook tweaks the content that you see in order to keep up your interest levels.
This isn’t something Facebook hides, either. A Facebook spokesman told Channel 4 News: “We do research to improve our services and to make the content people see on Facebook as relevant and engaging as possible.
“A big part of this is understanding how people respond to different types of content, whether it’s positive or negative in tone, news from friends, or information from pages they follow.”
That’s why you’ll tend to see more posts involving new babies, weddings and new jobs. Facebook also monitors the people whose posts you tend to engage with (for example, by liking their comments), and whose photos you tend to look at, and gives you more of their material on your news feed.
It’s not just a clever use of technology: it’s at the very heart of Facebook’s success. The software that spots your likes and dislikes, your connections and interests, is Facebook’s intellectual property. The more it hones that technology, the more often people visit the site, and the more ad revenue they get.
So now you know the truth. Happy?
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