Hasta La Creative!

The news over the weekend that Facebook secretly conducted mood-altering experiments on nearly 700,000 users — manipulating the proportion of positive and negative posts in individual News Feeds to see if it could affect people’s “experience of emotions” (spoiler: it can!) — has provoked predictable outrage. Adam Kramer, one of the Facebook data scientists who conducted the study (creepily titled “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks”) has, also predictably, issued a sort of half-apology, writing on his Facebook page on Sunday that “my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.”

The outrage seems likely to blow over quickly in the U.S. — at this point Americans seem almost entirely inured to Facebook’s shadiness — but maybe not quite so fast in Europe. Last night, The Guardian reports, Jim Sheridan, a senior member of the British parliament, called for an investigation, saying, “This is extraordinarily powerful stuff and if there is not already legislation on this, then there should be to protect people. … If people are being thought-controlled in this kind of way there needs to be protection and they at least need to know about it.”

So far, Facebook hasn’t reacted to Sheridan’s concerns, but I think it should — maybe with a statement like, “We demand an investigation into why Jim Sheridan feels this way. Is someone making him say these things?”

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