Laurie Penny on Facebook's manipulation: It can manipulate your mood. It can affect whether you vote. When do we start to worry?

When you clicked the little box that said you agreed to Facebook’s terms of service, you agreed to be a lab rat. The internet is alight with news of a study conducted by the social media company’s research department into “emotional contagion”. Over 600,000 people had their Facebook newsfeeds altered to reflect more “positive” or “negative” content, in order to determine if seeing more sad messages makes a person sadder. The “negative” content wasn’t entirely censored from the newsfeeds of the test subjects – if you checked in to your friend’s personal page, you could still see if he’d had a good day or not. But the newsfeeds themselves were tweaked without warning, and the emotional responses of test subjects tracked, judged by changes in their use of language. The findings of the study – that people are influenced by the emotions of others online as they are offline – surprised precisely nobody. The findings are not the point. The point, and indeed the fact that has sent rip

30 Jun 2014 ... Laurie Penny on Facebook's manipulation: It can manipulate your mood. It can affect whether you vote. When do we start to worry? The social ...

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