Facebook’s Secret 2012 Mood Experiment

In 2012, Facebook researchers quietly manipulated the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users as part of a study on emotional contagion. The experiment altered the balance of positive and negative posts shown to users to see whether it influenced the tone of their own updates. Participants were not informed about the experiment while it was happening. When the study became public in 2014, critics argued that Facebook had effectively treated its users as unwitting test subjects.

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