Once again, I have another good reason to leave Facebook. Back in 2012 (or thereabouts) I left because of the blatant discrimination and blocking of Christian and Conservative themed pages. But don’t take my word for it. See a page that has documented many examples of the political and religious censorship and harassment by Facebook
A few days ago, the news came out (at least it did on Fox News Channel) that these nefarious individuals took it upon themselves to do a secret mood manipulation experiment on over 600,000 users (without their permission or knowledge) makes me feel that the honesty and integrity of these people is highly questionable. As the article states at the top – “It was probably legal. But was it ethical?”
We interrupt this (about to be published) post for BREAKING NEWS! Just found this link at another site:
SCG News: Facebook’s Psychological Experiments Connected to Department of Defense Research on Civil Unrest!
Excerpt:
It turns out that one of the researchers who ran Facebook’s recent psychological experiments received funding from the U.S. Department of Defense to study the contagion of ideas.
There has been quite a bit of chatter this past week after it was revealed that a recent Facebook outage was the result of a psychological experiment that the company conducted on a portion of its users without their permission. The experiment, which was described in a paper published by Facebook, and UCSF, tested the contagion of emotions on social media by manipulating the content of personal feeds and measuring how this impacted user behavior.
Over 600,000 users were used as guinea pigs without their consent, which raises a number of serious ethical and legal questions (particularly due to the fact that this study received federal funding), however there is an even more disturbing angle to this story. It turns out that this research was connected to a Department of Defense project called the Minerva Initiative, which funds universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world.
In the official credits for the study conducted by Facebook you’ll find Jeffrey T. Hancock from Cornell University. If you go to the Minerva initiative website you’ll find that Jeffery Hancock received funding from the Department of Defense for a study called “Cornell: Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes”. If you go to the project site for that study you’ll find a visualization program that models the spread of beliefs and disease.
Cornell University is currently being funded for another DoD study right now called “Cornell: Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social Contagions” (you’ll find the description for this project on the Minerva Initiative’s funding page).
The Department of Defense’s investment in the mechanics of psychological contagion and Facebook’s assistance, have some very serious implications, particularly when placed in context with other scandals which have broken in the past two years.
First of all we know that Facebook willingly participated (and presumably is still participating) in the NSA’s PRISM program by giving the agency unfettered access to user communications. We also know that the U.S. government has invested heavily in technology used to track and model the spread of opinions on social media.
Continue reading HERE
WELL…THERE YOU HAVE IT! SHOULD HAVE SUSPECTED ALL ALONG THAT THE ZERO BADministration WAS INVOLVED WITH THIS!
The entire time that I was working on this post, I thought in the back of my mind that there must be something more to the “Facebook Secret Manipulation Experiment.” Well, I found it! We now return to the original post content.
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I agree with one commenter at the (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/) link who wrote:
“Principled_Idealist
I guess Big Brother is done with just watching.
Now it involves manipulation of emotions. When you give permission to FB via the “agreement” when you signed up, did you know that you, your family, your friends, and your postings would not only be “owned” content, but would be used to manipulate? It’s one thing to try and manipulate purchases via ads, but to change the news feed (either positive stories or negative ones) of over 600,000 members in order to manipulate their emotions is unethical – to say the least!
Excerpt:
Updated, Monday, 10:40 p.m. Eastern.
Facebook’s News Feed—the main list of status updates, messages, and photos you see when you open Facebook on your computer or phone—is not a perfect mirror of the world.
But few users expect that Facebook would change their News Feed in order to manipulate their emotional state.
We now know that’s exactly what happened two years ago. For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700,000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves.
This tinkering was just revealed as part of a new study, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many previous studies have used Facebook data to examine “emotional contagion,” as this one did. This study is different because, while other studies have observed Facebook user data, this one set out to manipulate it.
The experiment is almost certainly legal. In the company’s current terms of service, Facebook users relinquish the use of their data for “data analysis, testing, [and] research.” Is it ethical, though? Since news of the study first emerged, I’ve seen and heard both privacy advocates and casual users express surprise at the audacity of the experiment.
Further down in the article:
Did an institutional review board (IRB)—an independent ethics committee that vets research that involves humans—approve the experiment?
Yes, according to Susan Fiske, the Princeton University psychology professor who edited the study for publication. It seems an IRB was only consulted about the methods of data analysis, though, and not those of data collection.
According to a Cornell University press statement on Monday, the experiment was conducted before an IRB was consulted. Cornell professor Jeffrey Hancock—an author of the study—began working on the results after Facebook had conducted the experiment. Hancock only had access to results, says the release, so “Cornell University’s Institutional Review Board concluded that he was not directly engaged in human research and that no review by the Cornell Human Research Protection Program was required.”
In other words, the experiment had already been run, so its human subjects were beyond protecting. Assuming the researchers did not see users’ confidential data, the results of the experiment could be examined without further endangering any subjects.
Both Cornell and Facebook have been reluctant to provide details about the process beyond their respective prepared statements. One of the study’s authors told The Atlantic on Monday that he’s been advised by the university not to speak to reporters.
By the time the study reached Susan Fiske, the Princeton University psychology professor who edited the study for publication, Cornell’s IRB members had already determined it outside of their purview.
Fiske had earlier conveyed to The Atlantic that the experiment was IRB-approved.
“I was concerned,” Fiske told The Atlantic on Saturday, “until I queried the authors and they said their local institutional review board had approved it—and apparently on the grounds that Facebook apparently manipulates people’s News Feeds all the time.”
There you have it folks! FB does this kind of manipulation all the time!
On Saturday, Fiske said that she didn’t want the “the originality of the research” to be lost, but called the experiment “an open ethical question.”
“It’s ethically okay from the regulations perspective, but ethics are kind of social decisions. There’s not an absolute answer. And so the level of outrage that appears to be happening suggests that maybe it shouldn’t have been done…I’m still thinking about it and I’m a little creeped out, too.” [bold and italics mine]
For more, check Atlantic editor Adrienne LaFrance’s full interview with Prof. Fiske.
What’s more:
As mentioned above, the research seems to have been carried out under Facebook’s extensive terms of service. The company’s current data use policy, which governs exactly how it may use users’ data, runs to more than 9,000 words and uses the word “research” twice. But as Forbes writer Kashmir Hill reported Monday night, the data use policy in effect when the experiment was conducted never mentioned “research” at all—the word wasn’t inserted until May 2012. [bold mine]
I plan to link this post on my current FB page and will keep it up for a few days. It might end up being censored – we shall see. However, after a few days I will need to leave FB.
I do not know if any users will take these issues as seriously as I have, but it’s just plain ethical for me to warn my family, friends, and acquaintances about the facts regarding not only the political and religious censorship and harassment on that site, but also the secret mood manipulation experiment. It’s truly disgusting that FB would allow a defamation page that says something as awful as this:
June 2014: The Facebook page “Virgin Mary should´ve aborted“ covers images of the unborn Jesus as an abortion victim wearing a crown of thorns and blood flowing from his side while the Virgin Mary smokes a marijuana cigar. The content of this page is mostly anti-Christian, as well as pro-abortion. The statements on this page are spreading defamation and hatred against Christians and Christianity.
Such nefarious deeds echo the warnings of:
Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”
George Orwell’s “1984”
Most prophetic of all, is what is written in the Bible.
Jesus’ own words and warnings about an evil generation looking for “a sign” and much more is written in Matthew 12
The book of Jude prophetically describes how it will be the closer we approach the end times.
Despite all of this, we know that when we belong to Jesus, we can be joyful and glad – even in the midst of all the chaos of sin, evil, and death being inflicted in this fallen world:
Jde 1:20
But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit,
Jde 1:21
keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.
Jde 1:22
And on some have compassion, making a distinction; [fn]
Jde 1:23
but others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire, [fn] hating even the garment defiled by the flesh.
Jde 1:24
Now to Him who is able to keep you [fn] from stumbling,
And to present you faultless
Before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy,
Jde 1:25
To God our Savior, [fn]
Who alone is wise, [fn]
Be glory and majesty,
Dominion and power, [fn]
Both now and forever.
Amen.
~ Christine
Hat tips to all links.
Update: Posted this link on FB. We shall see what happens.
Talk Wisdom 