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Facebook conducting SECRET EXPERIMENTS on users.

Started by Pæs, June 28, 2014, 09:01:42 AM

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LMNO

Quote from: Cain on June 30, 2014, 10:05:06 AM
QuoteFacebook is not financially supported by the federal government

Uh-huhSure.

Oh, snap.

Cain

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/even-the-editor-of-facebooks-mood-study-thought-it-was-creepy/373649/

QuoteEven Susan Fiske, the professor of psychology at Princeton University who edited the study for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of America, had doubts when the research first crossed her desk.

"I was concerned," she told me in a phone interview, "until I queried the authors and they said their local institutional review board had approved it—and apparently on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people's News Feeds all the time... I understand why people have concerns. I think their beef is with Facebook, really, not the research."

But, as The Atlantic, in a rare act of investigative journalism, points out:

QuoteBut there seems to be a question of whether Facebook actually went through an IRB. In a Facebook post on Sunday, study author Adam Kramer referenced "internal review practices." A Forbes report, citing an unnamed source, said that Facebook only used an internal review. When I asked Fiske to clarify, she told me the researchers'  "revision letter said they had Cornell IRB approval as a 'pre-existing dataset' presumably from FB, who seems to have reviewed it as well in some unspecified way... Under IRB regulations, pre-existing dataset would have been approved previously and someone is just analyzing data already collected, often by someone else."

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Cain on June 30, 2014, 10:05:06 AM
QuoteFacebook is not financially supported by the federal government

Uh-huhSure.

Well doesn't THAT look messy for Facebook?
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Cain

Quote from: The Right Reverend Nigel on June 30, 2014, 04:57:31 PM
Quote from: Cain on June 30, 2014, 10:05:06 AM
QuoteFacebook is not financially supported by the federal government

Uh-huhSure.

Well doesn't THAT look messy for Facebook?

Well, after that fiasco of a stock market opening, I suppose Facebook oughta be thankful that SOMEONE is at least willing to give them money.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Cain on June 30, 2014, 05:05:04 PM
Quote from: The Right Reverend Nigel on June 30, 2014, 04:57:31 PM
Quote from: Cain on June 30, 2014, 10:05:06 AM
QuoteFacebook is not financially supported by the federal government

Uh-huhSure.

Well doesn't THAT look messy for Facebook?

Well, after that fiasco of a stock market opening, I suppose Facebook oughta be thankful that SOMEONE is at least willing to give them money.

You'd think they would have considered maybe talking to someone who had taken a class in research ethics or maybe read a book. I mean, there are a few books out there, given that research ethics is currently, oh I don't know, THE HOTTEST TOPIC IN THE RESEARCH COMMUNITY right now and you can't go anywhere without running into a speaker on the topic. Fairly obviously, the "scientists" at Facebook have no formal training. What a fuckup.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Junkenstein

If only there was some way for these scientists at Facebook to communicate with their peers.

Oh.
Nine naked Men just walking down the road will cause a heap of trouble for all concerned.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Junkenstein on June 30, 2014, 06:47:13 PM
If only there was some way for these scientists at Facebook to communicate with their peers.

Oh.

:lulz:
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


The Johnny


If motherfucking Myspace had a chat application instead of just inbox or wall, this would had never happened.

A plague on both your houses.
<<My image in some places, is of a monster of some kind who wants to pull a string and manipulate people. Nothing could be further from the truth. People are manipulated; I just want them to be manipulated more effectively.>>

-B.F. Skinner

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: The Johnny on July 01, 2014, 12:49:38 AM

If motherfucking Myspace had a chat application instead of just inbox or wall, this would had never happened.

A plague on both your houses.

I'd consider going back to Myspace. Hell, I'd go back to Friendster as long as they didn't replicate their "no fake account" tyranny.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Cramulus

Quote from: The Right Reverend Nigel on June 29, 2014, 08:52:03 PM
Quote from: Cramulus on June 29, 2014, 01:37:30 PM
yep. we all gave informed consent in the user agreement.

Not in a sense any Institutional Review Board would recognize or accept as ethical. And very clearly not in any way the NIH would consider ethical. Obviously, Facebook isn't held to NIH standards, but still, performing mood manipulation experiments on a population that could not by any reasonable expectation be considered properly informed or to have given actual consent is shitty and unethical.

Well, it was a peer reviewed study, published in pnas. So their IRB does apparently think that the legally binding TOS agreement qualifies as informed consent. I suspect it'd hold up in court -we know nobody reads those things, but they're still legal agreements. If somebody asks you to sign an informed-consent document, and you don't read it but sign it anyway, you've still given informed consent.

Only one of the three authors is a facebook researcher. Doing some research on the other names --- one is (this is weird) a researcher for a tobacco watchdog group (?), the other is a professor at Ithica, with a pretty extensive body of research on affect control theory. Looks like he's been focused on researching the link between exposure to digital social networks and self-esteem since at least 2011.


I am still somewhat alarmed by the research, but I gotta wonder, if we didn't feel like facebook was conducting it in secret, would it still be alarming? Maybe it's good that we're discovering these links. The relationship between online social networks and your emotional state is probably a healthy topic to examine. At least THIS research is being done in public, in a peer reviewed journal, rather than some secret MK-ULTRA style lab. Looking at the abstract of Hancock's other work - it's interesting stuff. I don't think I have a problem with his other work, it was the initial attention grabbing headline of "FACEBOOK IS DOING MIND CONTROL RESEARCH" that put me on guard.

Cramulus

Quote from: Cain on June 30, 2014, 04:33:56 PM
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/even-the-editor-of-facebooks-mood-study-thought-it-was-creepy/373649/

QuoteEven Susan Fiske, the professor of psychology at Princeton University who edited the study for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of America, had doubts when the research first crossed her desk.

"I was concerned," she told me in a phone interview, "until I queried the authors and they said their local institutional review board had approved it—and apparently on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people's News Feeds all the time... I understand why people have concerns. I think their beef is with Facebook, really, not the research."

But, as The Atlantic, in a rare act of investigative journalism, points out:

QuoteBut there seems to be a question of whether Facebook actually went through an IRB. In a Facebook post on Sunday, study author Adam Kramer referenced "internal review practices." A Forbes report, citing an unnamed source, said that Facebook only used an internal review. When I asked Fiske to clarify, she told me the researchers'  "revision letter said they had Cornell IRB approval as a 'pre-existing dataset' presumably from FB, who seems to have reviewed it as well in some unspecified way... Under IRB regulations, pre-existing dataset would have been approved previously and someone is just analyzing data already collected, often by someone else."

oh snapple apple!

well shit yeah, if their IRB gave them permission to use a pre-existing data set, that certainly doesn't account for tinkering with the news feed and then collecting new data.

So if facebook is calling this a gray area because they tinker with news feeds all the time (and therefore this doesn't count as a manipulation, but business-as-usual) then I'd want to hear a finer explanation of why and how they filter users' news feed and how this research is different from their day to day practice.


Cramulus

btw, I haven't watched this yet, but here's a TED talk I found by one of the paper's authors:

https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hancock_3_types_of_digital_lies

QuoteWho hasn't sent a text message saying "I'm on my way" when it wasn't true or fudged the truth a touch in their online dating profile? But Jeff Hancock doesn't believe that the anonymity of the internet encourages dishonesty. In fact, he says the searchability and permanence of information online may even keep us honest.

it does sound like a kissing-cousin to Zuckerberg's opinions on privacy... that visibility leads to honesty, and living in the open is the new social norm.

Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Cramulus on July 01, 2014, 02:21:22 PM
Quote from: The Right Reverend Nigel on June 29, 2014, 08:52:03 PM
Quote from: Cramulus on June 29, 2014, 01:37:30 PM
yep. we all gave informed consent in the user agreement.

Not in a sense any Institutional Review Board would recognize or accept as ethical. And very clearly not in any way the NIH would consider ethical. Obviously, Facebook isn't held to NIH standards, but still, performing mood manipulation experiments on a population that could not by any reasonable expectation be considered properly informed or to have given actual consent is shitty and unethical.

Well, it was a peer reviewed study, published in pnas. So their IRB does apparently think that the legally binding TOS agreement qualifies as informed consent. I suspect it'd hold up in court -we know nobody reads those things, but they're still legal agreements. If somebody asks you to sign an informed-consent document, and you don't read it but sign it anyway, you've still given informed consent.

Only one of the three authors is a facebook researcher. Doing some research on the other names --- one is (this is weird) a researcher for a tobacco watchdog group (?), the other is a professor at Ithica, with a pretty extensive body of research on affect control theory. Looks like he's been focused on researching the link between exposure to digital social networks and self-esteem since at least 2011.


I am still somewhat alarmed by the research, but I gotta wonder, if we didn't feel like facebook was conducting it in secret, would it still be alarming? Maybe it's good that we're discovering these links. The relationship between online social networks and your emotional state is probably a healthy topic to examine. At least THIS research is being done in public, in a peer reviewed journal, rather than some secret MK-ULTRA style lab. Looking at the abstract of Hancock's other work - it's interesting stuff. I don't think I have a problem with his other work, it was the initial attention grabbing headline of "FACEBOOK IS DOING MIND CONTROL RESEARCH" that put me on guard.

I don't think you read the articles Cain or I posted... whether there actually is a Facebook IRB is in doubt, and if there is, it profoundly fails to live up to the ethical standards set by the single largest health science research funding agency in the world.

Further, the questions being raised, and specifically the phrasing of my own objection, concerns whether the way they went about conducting the research is ethical (by current generally-accepted standards) and whether it has high potential to foster public distrust of social science research.

Being published does not endorse the ethics of the research, and it certainly does nothing to mitigate the damage done to the research community by irresponsible and unethical researchers. A major paper was published from the Tuskegee experiment.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Also, when it comes to experimentation, just fucking no. Nobody trained in biomedical or social research thinks that an online TOS agreement qualifies as "Informed Consent", which is held to a COMPLETELY different standard than software TOS.

It's adorable that you think I don't know what I'm talking about, though.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."