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“Facebook reveals news feed experiment to control emotions” – The Guardian
“Facebook conducted secret psychology experiment on users’ emotions” – The Telegraph
“Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users’ Emotions For ‘Creepy’ Secret Experiment” – The Huffington Post
We learnt yesterday that in 2012 Facebook, alongside academics from Cornell and the University of California, ran a psychological experiment manipulating some users’ timelines to see what would happen. The results showed that what people read had an impact on their own emotions. An influx of positive stories in a person’s timeline led to an increased likelihood that the user would post positive stories themselves, negative stories led to a higher likelihood of negative posts.
According to the Guardian, the study concluded: “Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks.”
Media uproar
Unsurprisingly, people…
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