Mood Ringer

Scott Hardie | July 6, 2014
Everyone is up in arms about Facebook's mood study in which it deliberately tried to make its audience sad. Why is no one suing Fox News for deliberately trying to make its audience angry? That's a joke, but it's not really, in the sense that every corporation tries in some capacity to manipulate emotion, as any marketer can tell you. I really don't understand the outrage over this particular incident. So Facebook manipulated its content for some users to see how they would react -- isn't that called A/B testing in the industry? So the intended emotion was sadness -- don't plenty of organizations do that, to solicit charitable donations or sell insurance? So Facebook shared the aggregate data with an outside research firm -- isn't this what Facebook does every day with advertisers? I can't help but wonder if some of the anger over this is just because it's Facebook, since every move that Facebook makes seems to rile certain people up, and the news media are all too quick to report it because the word "Facebook" in the headline piques interest. Am I missing some detail that makes this study as reprehensible as people seem to think it is?

Erik Bates | July 7, 2014
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