In an experiment it conducted earlier this year, Facebook injected the feeds of nearly 700,000 its users with negative content to see if it would make the posts they wrote more negative. The researchers believe that it did. The mood of the posts seen in the news feeds of the experiment’s subjects moved like a “contagion” into the posts of said subjects. The inverse, too, was true, the researchers say. Facebook actually messed with the moods of its users, who — allow me to remind you — are Facebook’s bread and butter. Exposing users to the advertisements of Facebook’s partners — on and off Facebook – is the social media giant’s only real business. So it’s surprising that Facebook would conduct such experiments, and even more surprising that it would be dumb enough to publish the results. The paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
