Facebook fixing guidelines for experiments on users’ behaviour
Company admits failure to communicate handling of study
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook Inc. plans to keep experimenting with how its service affects users’ behaviour — just more responsibly.
The world’s leading social networking site said in a blog post Thursday that it is giving its researchers clearer guidelines to follow when studying sensitive topics, such as users’ emotions. Facebook said it has also created a board comprising members of its legal and privacy teams to review proposed projects.
The changes follow a controversy in June over a 2012 mood experiment that influenced what almost 700,000 Facebook members saw on their news feeds, which the company didn’t publicly disclose until this year.
Facebook has repeatedly had to respond to concerns about how it handles data on its members, which now number more than 1.3 billion worldwide. Last month, the company prompted users to review their privacy settings, taking a proactive step to assuage such concerns.
“It is clear now that there are things we should have done differently,” chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer said in Thursday’s post, referring to the 2012 experiment. “In releasing the study, we failed to communicate clearly why and how we did it.”
Facebook’s psychological experiment altered the number of positive and negative comments in some members’ news feeds during a week in 2012 and tested their reaction. The company, which published its results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that users who saw happy posts felt happy.
That refuted earlier studies that said seeing happy posts from others can cause the reader to feel depressed.
The publication of the study drew outrage over how the company had used people as guinea pigs without their specific consent. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy group, filed a complaint against the company with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in July, asking regulators to investigate the experiment.
A Facebook researcher involved in the study later publicly apologized for the situation. Chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said the study was “communicated poorly.”