LONDON — British regulators are investigating revelations that Facebook treated hordes of its users like laboratory rats in an experiment probing into their emotions.
The Information Commissioner’s Office said Wednesday that it wants to learn more about the circumstances underlying a 2-year-old study carried out by two U.S. universities and the world’s largest social network.
The inquiry is being coordinated with authorities in Ireland, where Facebook has headquarters for its European operations, as well as with French regulators.
This is just the latest in a string of incidents that have raised questions about whether the privacy rights of Facebook’s nearly 1.3 billion users are being trampled by the company’s drive to dissect data and promote behavior that could help sell more online advertising.
In this case, Facebook allowed researchers to manipulate the content that appeared in the main section, or “news feed,” of about 700,000 randomly selected users during a single week in January 2012. The data-scientists were trying to collect evidence to prove their thesis that people’s moods could spread like an “emotional contagion” depending on the tenor of the content that they were reading.
The study concluded that people were more likely to post negative updates about their lives after the volume of positive information appearing in their Facebook feeds had been purposefully reduced by the researchers. The opposite reaction occurred when the number of negative posts appeared in people’s news feeds.
None of the participants in the Facebook experiments were explicitly asked for their permission, though the social network’s terms of use appears to allow for the company to manipulate what appears in users’ news feeds however it sees fits.
The reaction to the study itself provided evidence of how quickly an emotional contagion can spread online. The research was released a month ago, but it didn’t provoke a backlash until the past few days after other social media sites and essays in The New York Times and The Atlantic raised red flags about the ethics of Facebook’s experiment.
As it has done in several past breaches of privacy etiquette, Facebook is now trying to make amends.
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