Many people feel as though they are in control of their own emotions and feelings when they scroll through their Facebook feed, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. What if I were to tell you that Facebook actually controls what you see and don’t see or that you may be an unknowing candidate for a psychological experiment. Would this make you uncomfortable or perhaps angry? Is this an invasion of privacy? Well this is exactly what they did back in January of 2012. Facebook secretly conducted a massive psychological experiment on nearly 700,000 users by manipulating news feeds to learn if negative or positive postings affected moods.
Many people were very uncomfortable and outraged to find this out. People felt that this was a complete invasion of privacy. What right did Facebook have to try to manipulate the moods of its users? During their experiments, Facebook decided to hide or show posts based on the way they wanted you to feel. They did this without users’ knowledge or consent. Although this experiment was conducted a while ago, there is still a valid reason to question how users can ever trust Facebook again once they become aware of their tactics. If Facebook was so willing to do this then, what other experiments are users being subjected to as unwitting participants? Another more important question, are Facebook users’ personal information being exploited for Facebook’s benefit?
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