I don’t know what to think about this, but I’m not thrilled, that’s for sure.
On the one hand, I’ve never worried too much about secrecy when I’m on facebook. What I post, I want everyone to read. Mostly. There’ve been times I’ve posted stuff and then thought “Whoops, shouldn’t have said that. What if xxxxx sees it?” but that happens in real life, too, outside of facebook.
Hay, Zuck! Here’s a clue – if you don’t want people to think you’re an asshole. STOP being an ASSHOLE.
Also, I have realized, from the beginning, that we are part of Mark Zuckerberg’s grand social experiment. The targeted advertising can be a bit offensive, especially the constant weight loss ads I get. Sure, I could stand to lose a few pounds, but that jiggling belly gif that keeps popping up on my screen is just gross. But, as much as I don’t like the targeted advertising, it is better than the old, untargeted advertising. That was just mostly a huge waste of viewer time and advertisers’ dollars. facebook is streamlining the economy.
But I didn’t actually think they were manipulating which posts we see just to mess with our heads. That’s screwed up. Research, they call it. Agreed to it when we joined, they said. Which may all be technically true, but it’s still screwed up.
What they did was adjust the feed so one group of several thousand users saw more positive, upbeat posts and another similar sized group saw more negative posts, to see if that would influence people’s posts. Well, duh. When you see a post that says “My mother passed away on this day 5 years ago” you aren’t going to reply with a snappy pun, are you?
If Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t such a pathetic, isolated from the human race, computer nerd who would fail a Voigt-Kampff test, he would have already known that people react to the mood of people around them.
I suppose the thing that bothers me most about this is how crashingly unnecessary this all was. They didn’t need control groups. They didn’t need to manipulate the data. All they needed to do was look through everybody’s data, see who’d just received negative (or positive) messages, and see what they posted next.
If all this was going to lead to a better facebook, I might not be too bothered. It’s sort of like testing stuff on animals. Sad for the lab mice, but if they’re looking for a cure for cancer, or alzheimer’s, or muscular dystrophy, hey, kill all the mice you want, no objections for me. But if it’s for cosmetics, that’s bullshit.
I don’t think this is going to lead to a better facebook. I think it is going to be used for market research and the continuing enrichment of Mark Zuckerberg. So, it’s bullshit.
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