Facebook Ran A Huge Psychological Experiment On 689,003 Users

[The Brain]

It was created for the nookie.

[Ideologue]

It was created so Jesse Eisenberg could become a star.

[Eddie Teach]

Clearly it wasn't that or it wouldn't have expanded like it did.

It expanded cause they realized they could make money off it.

Anyway, I'm just going off the movie. 

[Eddie Teach]

It was created so Jesse Eisenberg could become a star.

Did it do that? I mean, Zombieland and Adventureland came before Social Network, and haven't really seen him much lately.

[The Brain]

It was created because people weren't spending enough fucking time on the internet as it was.

[Ideologue]

It was created so Jesse Eisenberg could become a star.

Did it do that? I mean, Zombieland and Adventureland came before Social Network, and haven't really seen him much lately.

He was in Now You See Me last year, and in this year he's been in The Double and some eco-terrorist thriller-thing, the name of which I forget.  He's gone to ground a little, but it seems by choice.

[Maximus]

Pretty sure that facebook wasn't created with the intention of running psych experiments.

What are you basing that on?

[Josquius]

There was an article not that long ago on teen depression saying that teens can get depressed/more depressed when on social media and they see all their friends posting positive/cool things. They compare to their own lives and then feel sadder - forgetting that people are not often posting about boring/non-fun bits.

Makes sense to me.
And I don't think it would be just teens.

[KRonn]

Reading about this leaves me with negative feelings.... 

[MadImmortalMan]

VaultCo was created to save people from nuclear attack, but they did the same thing. 


Facebook experiments carry the fatal flaw that the test population is highly disproportionally drawn from certain types of people. You need a broader range of personality types for a scientific test.

[Malthus]

Heh, not so sure the Data Agreement allowed for this.

The Agreement says they can use your data as follows:

■ for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.

https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/your-info

Now, it does say they can use it for "research", but in context it looks like the implication is that this will be research intended, essentially, to improve the site.

[garbon]

Facebook experiments carry the fatal flaw that the test population is highly disproportionally drawn from certain types of people. You need a broader range of personality types for a scientific test.

I don't know about that. I think there is a very high percent of people in the west who use facebook.

This seems like a good critique from the angle of failure to parse sarcasm.

http://www.vox.com/2014/6/30/5856938/the-facebook-study-wasnt-just-creepy-it-was-bad-research

[The Brain]

Facebook experiments carry the fatal flaw that the test population is highly disproportionally drawn from certain types of people. You need a broader range of personality types for a scientific test.

Why, in your own words, can't scientific tests be done on disproportionate subsets of humans?