Facebook Investigated By ICO Over ‘Emotional Contagion’ Experiment

The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is taking an interest in reports that Facebook secretly manipulated the emotions of its users while conducting a psychological experiment.

The world’s largest social network recently published a study in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which it described how flooding a user’s newsfeed with negative images could lead them to produce negative comments. The research project was instantly criticised by the user community, academics, politicians and privacy campaigners alike.

“We’re aware of this issue and will be speaking to Facebook, as well as liaising with the Irish data protection authority, to learn more about the circumstances,” said a spokesperson for the ICO.

Toying with my emotions

The week-long study, carried out in 2012 on more than 689,000 accounts in partnership with two universities, investigated the ways in which manipulating the newsfeed seen by a user affected their mood. The study found that users posted more positive comments if they were exposed to positive content, and vice-versa, a phenomenon the study termed emotional “contagion”.

“Given the massive scale of social networks such as Facebook, even small effects can have large aggregated consequences,” the researchers said in the study.

Publication of the experiment caused a major backlash since Facebook had not obtained consent from its subjects, the way it should have done for academic research. Facebook defended itself, saying that such consent was given when the user agreed to its Terms and Conditions.

Now, whether the social network crossed the line will be a matter for the ICO. The watchdog has the powers to issue fines of up to £500,000 if turns out that the experiment breached UK’s stringent data protection laws.

Earlier this year, the ICO fined the British Pregnancy Advice Service (BPAS), a charity which helps women considering abortion, £200,000 after a data breach revealed the names of 10,000 of its users to Anonymous hacker James Jeffery.

And in 2012, the organisation issued a massive £400,000 fine to the spam-spewing owners of Tetrus Telecoms.

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