Facebook deliberately showed more or fewer negative or positive posts to nearly 700,000 users over the course of a week in January of 2012 in order to study emotional transference online. Microsoft researcher and social media scholar danah boyd explains that this outrage is more than the feeling that Facebook did something unethical or sociopathic; I’m glad this study has prompted an intense debate among scholars and the public, but I fear it’s turned into a simplistic attack on Facebook over this particular study, rather than a nuanced debate over how we create meaningful ethical oversight in research and practice.
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