Amid growing calls for formal investigations into Facebook’s disturbing mood manipulation research, media scholar Jay Rosen has a reminder for journalists, editors, and personal social media users alike: “Facebook has all the power. You have almost none.” The experiment, conducted without users’ knowledge or consent, manipulated the News Feeds of nearly 700,000 Facebook users with the purpose of testing mood responses to content alteration.
The Federal Trade Commission is considering two formal complaints about the 2012 Facebook research, published contentiously in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal—one from US Senator Mark Warner and another from the Electronic Privacy Information Centre. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office is investigating.
