Many users may not have come to realize it — still — but all comments and photos put up a social network can stay there forever. On more than one occasion, they have been used by firms to decide whether to hire someone.
Facebook and Twitter are ruthless informants. They are also great tools for collecting personal data about likes and hobbies: valuable information for companies or brands that may thus present custom advertising — like a bespoke suit — to the social network’s subscribers.
Not content with knowing (almost) all about the billions of people connected to it, the famous Facebook conducted an experiment in 2012 to learn about its users’ emotions, a study of nearly 700,000 profiles to analyze their behavior after positive and negative news.
That experiment had, according to its directors, a scientific goal. Professors from the Universities of Cornell and California (U.S.) participated, plus a Facebook employee specializing in data processing. To undertake the study, they modified the algorithm of the social network to manipulate the news content that some 700,000 guinea pigs received for a week — all, of course, without advance notice.
The results of this study confirmed the obvious: Mood is contagious among users based on the annotations and comments their friends made. That is, good news brings joy and bad news, sadness. That is surely what Mark Zuckerberg feels when stock shares of Facebook go up or down.
The U.S. company has justified the experiment with this argument: “We were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook.” But in this case, the greater negativity has been the misleading of users who, moreover, were told of it two years after it happened.
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