Guinea Pigs On Facebook

There's a bunch of guinea pigs on Facebook, around 689,000 of them.  You wouldn't recognize them as rodents if you just looked at their Facebook pages.  Instead, you'd probably think they were people, some younger than the age of 18.  But guinea pigs they are, used by Facebook in an experiment to manipulate users' emotions by making the news feeds these users received either more negative or positive, and then measuring the effect on posts written by the g-pigs.  Evidently, g-pigs' emotions could be changed positively or negatively by the content of the posts they received.  In other words, emotion manipulation by Facebook seems possible.

Facebook claims that its terms of service allow this kind of experimentation.  If you didn't read the terms of service, then bear in mind that the possibility of this kind of horseship (sp) is exactly is the reason why you should read them.  But it may also be the case that Facebook's terms of service were kind of general, and written in that uniquely obtuse and obstructive language called legalese.   We would guess they didn't include a guinea pig clause, which explicitly informed users that they might be selected to be subjects in experiments in emotional manipulation where they wouldn't be informed of their selection and the emotional manipulation would be conducted in quite a non-obvious way.  So even if you were among the assiduous 0.01% who actually read the terms of service, you still might not have realized that you had just registered for the guinea pig draft and could be called up for service at any time.

Of course, one suspects that Facebook might not have wanted to let the g-pigs know what was going on.  Unknowing g-pigs would likely produce more meaningful experimental results than users who knew what was going on.  And if one considers Facebook's corporate interests to be more important than the interests and dignity of its users, then all this might make sense.  But if users are thought to be deserving of fair treatment--radical notion, that--then you'd have to conclude that Facebook really stinks for having done this.

The world is full of emotional manipulation: advertisements, political campaigning, editorials, op-ed pages, robo-calls from every manner of charity you never heard of, etc.  And when it's clear that the game is to manipulate your emotions, that's okay (at least when it's directed at adults).  But when emotions are manipulated sneakily, and your participation isn't made known to you, then that's a reason to avoid Facebook and any other social networking websites that pull similar carp (sp). 

You have to wonder if the emotion manipulation experiment signals that Facebook has reached its zenith and is in decline.  Has Facebook run out of bona fide, valuable services to provide to users?  Is it now stooping to emotional manipulation to keep existing users and bring in new ones?  Do we really need Facebook, or have we been manipulated into thinking we need Facebook?