Description: Facebook says it’s making changes after an uproar over its mood manipulation experiment.

Source: CNN Money

Date: October 2, 2014

 

The announcement marks Facebook’s fullest public acknowledgment yet of problems with the study, conducted unwittingly on some 690,000 users for one week in early 2012. Some people in this group were shown a higher number of positive posts in their News Feeds, while others were shown more negative posts, in an attempt to gauge their emotional responses. But the study generated a backlash when it was published earlier this year, with Facebook accused of manipulating its users’ emotions without consent. Watch Video

Questions for discussion:

1. Were you aware that Facebook was “manipulating emotions” based on the content of posts you were shown?

2. Do you feel like this was a simple marketing experiment or do you feel threatened by this reveal of information?