This weekend, the Internet discovered a study published earlier this month in an academic journal that recounted how a Facebook data scientist, along with two university researchers, turned 689,003 users’ New Feeds positive or negative to see if it would elate or depress them. The purpose was to find out if emotions are “contagious” on social networks...

...Before this story broke, Betsy Haibel wrote a relevant post that linguistically elevated the stakes by calling companies’ assumption of consent from users as corporate rape culture. “The tech industry does not believe that the enthusiastic consent of its users is necessary,” wrote Haibel. “The tech industry doesn’t even believe in requiring affirmative consent.”

When I signed up for 23andMe — a genetic testing service — it asked if I was willing to be part of “23andWe,” which would allow my genetic material to be part of research studies. I had to affirmatively check a box to say I was okay with that. As I suggested when I wrote about this yesterday, I think Facebook should have something similar. While many users may already expect and be willing to have their behavior studied — and while that may be warranted with “research” being one of the 9,045 words in the data use policy — they don’t expect that Facebook will actively manipulate their environment in order to see how they react. That’s a new level of experimentation, turning Facebook from a fishbowl into a petri dish, and it’s why people are flipping out about this.

Alles bij de bron; Forbes [KashmirHill]