Tag: facebook

In defense of In Defense of Facebook

A long, long time ago (in social media terms), I wrote a post defending Facebook against accusations of ethical misconduct related to a newly-published study in PNAS. I won’t rehash the study, or the accusations, or my comments in any detail here; for that, you can read the original post (I also recommend reading this or this for added context). While I stand by most of what I wrote, as is the nature of things, sometimes new information comes to light, and sometimes people say things that make me change my mind. So I thought I’d post my updated thoughts and reactions. I also left some additional thoughts in a comment on my last post, which I won’t rehash here.

Anyway, in no particular order…

I’m not arguing for a lawless world where companies can do as they like with your data

Some people apparently interpreted my last post as a defense of Facebook’s data use policy in general. It wasn’t. I probably brought this on myself in part by titling the post “In Defense of Facebook”. Maybe I should have called it something like “In Defense of this one particular study done by one Facebook employee”. In any case, I’ll reiterate: I’m categorically not saying that Facebook–or any other company, for that matter–should be allowed to do whatever it likes with its users’ data. There are plenty of valid concerns one could raise about the way companies like Facebook store, manage, and use their users’ data. And for what it’s worth, I’m generally in favor of passing new rules regulating the use of personal data in the private sector. So, contrary to what some posts suggested, I was categorically not advocating for a laissez-faire world in which large corporations get to do as they please with your information, and there’s nothing us little people can do about it.

The point I made in my last post was much narrower than that–namely, that picking on the PNAS study as an example of ethically questionable practices at Facebook was a bad idea, because (a) there aren’t any new risks introduced by this manipulation that aren’t already dwarfed by the risks associated with using Facebook itself (which is not exactly a high-risk enterprise to begin with), and (b) there are literally thousands of experiments just like this being conducted every day by large companies intent on figuring out how best to market their products and services–so Facebook’s study doesn’t stand out in any respect. My point was not that you shouldn’t be concerned about who has your data and how they’re using it, but that it’s deeply counterproductive to go after Facebook for this particular experiment when Facebook is of the few companies in this arena who actually (occasionally) publish the results of their findings in the scientific literature, instead of hiding them entirely from the light, as almost everyone else does. Of course, that will probably change as a result of this controversy.

I Was Wrong–A/B Testing Edition.

One claim I made in my last post that was very clearly wrong is this (emphasis added):

What makes the backlash on this issue particularly strange is that I’m pretty sure most people do actually realize that their experience on Facebook (and on other websites, and on TV, and in restaurants, and in museums, and pretty much everywhere else) is constantly being manipulated. I expect that most of the people who’ve been complaining about the Facebook study on Twitter are perfectly well aware that Facebook constantly alters its user experience““I mean, they even see it happen in a noticeable way once in a while, whenever Facebook introduces a new interface.

After watching the commentary over the past two days, I think it’s pretty clear I was wrong about this. A surprisingly large number of people clearly were genuinely unaware that Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other major players in every major industry (not just tech–also banks, groceries, department stores, you name it) are constantly running large-scale, controlled experiments on their users and customers. For instance, here’s a telling comment left on my last post:

The main issue I have with the experiment is that they conducted it without telling us. Given, that would have been counterproductive, but even a small adverse affect is still an adverse affect. I just don’t like the idea that corporations can do stuff to me without my consent. Just my opinion.

Similar sentiments are all over the place. Clearly, the revelation that Facebook regularly experiments on its users without their knowledge was indeed just that to many people–a revelation. I suppose in this sense, there’s potentially a considerable upside to this controversy, inasmuch as it has clearly served to raise awareness of industry-standard practices.

Questions about the ethics of the PNAS paper’s publication

My post focused largely on the question of whether the experiment Facebook conducted was itself illegal or unethical. I took this to be the primary concern of most lay people who have expressed concern about the episode. As I discussed in my post, I think it’s quite clear that the experiment itself is (a) entirely legal and that (b) any ethical objections one could raise are actually much broader objections about the way we regulate data use and consumer privacy, and have nothing to do with Facebook in particular. However, there’s a separate question that does specifically concern Facebook–or really, the authors of the PNAS paper–which is whether the authors, in their efforts to publish their findings, violated any laws or regulations.

When I wrote my post, I was under the impression–based largely on reports of an interview with the PNAS editor, Susan Fiske–that the authors had in fact obtained approval to conduct the study from an IRB, and had simply neglected to include that information in the text (which would have been an Editorial lapse, but not an unethical act). I wrote as much in a comment on my post. I was not suggesting–as some seemed to take away–that Facebook doesn’t need to get IRB approval. I was operating on the assumption that it had obtained IRB approval, based on the information available at the time.

In any case, it now appears that may not be exactly what happened. Unfortunately, it’s not yet clear exactly what did happen. One version of events people have suggested is that the study’s authors exploited a loophole in the rules by having Facebook conduct and analyze the experiment without the involvement of the other authors–who only contributed to the genesis of the idea and the writing of the manuscript. However, this interpretation is not unambiguous, and risks maligning the authors’ reputations unfairly, because Adam Kramer’s post explaining the motivation for the experiment suggests that the idea for the experiment originated entirely at Facebook, and was related to internal needs:

The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional impact of Facebook and the people that use our product. We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out. At the same time, we were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook. We didn’t clearly state our motivations in the paper.

How you interpret the ethics of the study thus depends largely on what you believe actually happened. If you believe that the genesis and design of the experiment were driven by Facebook’s internal decision-making, and the decision to publish an interesting finding came only later, then there’s nothing at all ethically questionable about the authors’ behavior. It would have made no more sense to seek out IRB approval for this one experiment than for any of the other in-house experiments Facebook regularly conducts. And there is, again, no question whatsoever that Facebook does not have to get approval from anyone to do experiments that are not for the purpose of systematic, generalizable research.

Moreover, since the non-Facebook authors did in fact ask the IRB to review their proposal to use archival data–and the IRB exempted them from review, as is routinely done for this kind of analysis–there would be no legitimacy to the claim that the authors acted unethically. About the only claim one could raise an eyebrow at is that the authors “didn’t clearly state” their motivations. But since presenting a post-hoc justification for one’s studies that has nothing to do with the original intention is extremely common in psychology (though it shouldn’t be), it’s not really fair to fault Kramer et al for doing something that is standard practice.

If, on the other hand, the idea for the study did originate outside of Facebook, and the authors deliberately attempted to avoid prospective IRB review, then I think it’s fair to say that their behavior was unethical. However, given that the authors were following the letter of the law (if clearly not the spirit), it’s not clear that PNAS should have, or could have, rejected the paper. It certainly should have demanded that information regarding interactions with the IRB be included in the manuscript, and perhaps it could have published some kind of expression of concern alongside the paper. But I agree with Michelle Meyer’s analysis that, in taking the steps they took, the authors are almost certainly operating within the rules, because (a) Facebook itself is not subject to HHS rules, (b) the non-Facebook authors were not technically “engaged in research”, and (c) the archival use of already-collected data by the non-Facebook authors was approved by the Cornell IRB (or rather, the study was exempted from further review).

Absent clear evidence of what exactly happened in the lead-up to publication, I think the appropriate course of action is to withhold judgment. In the interim, what the episode clearly does do is lay bare how ill-prepared the existing HHS regulations are for dealing with the research use of data collected online–particularly when the data was acquired by private entities. Actually, it’s not just research use that’s problematic; it’s clear that many people complaining about Facebook’s conduct this week don’t really give a hoot about the “generalizable knowledge” side of things, and are fundamentally just upset that Facebook is allowed to run these kinds of experiments at all without providing any notification.

In my view, what’s desperately called for is a new set of regulations that provide a unitary code for dealing with consumer data across the board–i.e., in both research and non-research contexts. This leaves aside exactly what such regulations would look like, of course. My personal view is that the right direction to move in is to tighten consumer protection laws to better regulate management and use of private citizens’ data, while simultaneously liberalizing the research use of private datasets that have already been acquired. For example, I would favor a law that (a) forced Facebook and other companies to more clearly and explicitly state how they use their users’ data, (b) provided opt-out options when possible, along with the ability for users to obtain report of how their data has been used in the past, and (c) gave blanket approval to use data acquired under these conditions for any and all academic research purposes so long as the data are deidentified. Many people will disagree with this, of course, and have very different ideas. That’s fine; the key point is that the conversation we should be having is about how to update and revise the rules governing research vs. non-research uses of data in such a way that situations like the PNAS study don’t come up again.

What Facebook does is not research–until they try to publish it

Much of the outrage over the Facebook experiment is centered around the perception that Facebook shouldn’t be allowed to conduct research on its users without their consent. What many people mean by this, I think, is that Facebook shouldn’t be allowed to conduct any experiments on its users for purposes of learning things about user experience and behavior unless Facebook explicitly asks for permission. A point that I should have clarified in my original post is that Facebook users are, in the normal course of things, not considered participants in a research study, no matter how or how much their emotions are manipulated. That’s because the HHS’s definition of research includes, as a necessary component, that there be an active intention to contribute to generalizable new knowledge.

Now, to my mind, this isn’t a great way to define “research”–I think it’s a good idea to avoid definitions that depend on knowing what people’s intentions were when they did something. But that’s the definition we’re stuck with, and there’s really no ambiguity over whether Facebook’s normal operations–which include constant randomized, controlled experimentation on its users–constitute research in this sense. They clearly don’t. Put simply, if Facebook were to eschew disseminating its results to the broader community, the experiment in question would not have been subject to any HHS regulations whatsoever (though, as Michelle Meyer astutely pointed out, technically the experiment probably isn’t subject to HHS regulation even now, so the point is moot). Again, to reiterate: it’s only the fact that Kramer et al wanted to publish their results in a scientific journal that opened them up to criticism of research misconduct in the first place.

This observation may not have any impact on your view if your concern is fundamentally about the publication process–i.e., you don’t object to Facebook doing the experiment; what you object to is Facebook trying to disseminate their findings as research. But it should have a strong impact on your views if you were previously under the impression that Facebook’s actions must have violated some existing human subjects regulation or consumer protection law. The laws in the United States–at least as I understand them, and I admittedly am not a lawyer–currently afford you no such protection.

Now, is it a good idea to have two very separate standards, one for research and one for everything else? Probably not. Should Facebook be allowed to do whatever it wants to your user experience so long as it’s covered under the Data Use policy in the user agreement you didn’t read? Probably not. But what’s unequivocally true is that, as it stands right now, your interactions with Facebook–no matter how your user experience, data, or emotions are manipulated–are not considered research unless Facebook manipulates your experience with the express intent of disseminating new knowledge to the world.

Informed consent is not mandatory for research studies

As a last point, there seems to be a very common misconception floating around among commentators that the Facebook experiment was unethical because it didn’t provide informed consent, which is a requirement for all research studies involving experimental manipulation. I addressed this in the comments on my last post in response to other comments:

[I]t’s simply not correct to suggest that all human subjects research requires informed consent. At least in the US (where Facebook is based), the rules governing research explicitly provide for a waiver of informed consent. Directly from the HHS website:

An IRB may approve a consent procedure which does not include, or which alters, some or all of the elements of informed consent set forth in this section, or waive the requirements to obtain informed consent provided the IRB finds and documents that:

(1) The research involves no more than minimal risk to the subjects;

(2) The waiver or alteration will not adversely affect the rights and welfare of the subjects;

(3) The research could not practicably be carried out without the waiver or alteration; and

(4) Whenever appropriate, the subjects will be provided with additional pertinent information after participation.

Granting such waivers is a commonplace occurrence; I myself have had online studies granted waivers before for precisely these reasons. In this particular context, it’s very clear that conditions (1) and (2) are met (because this easily passes the “not different from ordinary experience” test). Further, Facebook can also clearly argue that (3) is met, because explicitly asking for informed consent is likely not viable given internal policy, and would in any case render the experimental manipulation highly suspect (because it would no longer be random). The only point one could conceivably raise questions about is (4), but here again I think there’s a very strong case to be made that Facebook is not about to start providing debriefing information to users every time it changes some aspect of the news feed in pursuit of research, considering that its users have already agreed to its User Agreement, which authorizes this and much more.

Now, if you disagree with the above analysis, that’s fine, but what should be clear enough is that there are many IRBs (and I’ve personally interacted with some of them) that would have authorized a waiver of consent in this particular case without blinking. So this is clearly well within “reasonable people can disagree” territory, rather than “oh my god, this is clearly illegal and unethical!” territory.

I can understand the objection that Facebook should have applied for IRB approval prior to conducting the experiment (though, as I note above, that’s only true if the experiment was initially conducted as research, which is not clear right now). However, it’s important to note that there is no guarantee that an IRB would have insisted on informed consent at all in this case. There’s considerable heterogeneity in different IRBs’ interpretation of the HHS guidelines (and in fact, even across different reviewers within the same IRB), and I don’t doubt that many IRBs would have allowed Facebook’s application to sail through without any problems (see, e.g., this comment on my last post)–though I think there’s a general consensus that a debriefing of some kind would almost certainly be requested.

In defense of Facebook

[UPDATE July 1st: I’ve now posted some additional thoughts in a second post here.]

It feels a bit strange to write this post’s title, because I don’t find myself defending Facebook very often. But there seems to be some discontent in the socialmediaverse at the moment over a new study in which Facebook data scientists conducted a large-scale–over half a million participants!–experimental manipulation on Facebook in order to show that emotional contagion occurs on social networks. The news that Facebook has been actively manipulating its users’ emotions has, apparently, enraged a lot of people.

The study

Before getting into the sources of that rage–and why I think it’s misplaced–though, it’s worth describing the study and its results. Here’s a description of the basic procedure, from the paper:

The experiment manipulated the extent to which people (N = 689,003) were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed. This tested whether exposure to emotions led people to change their own posting behaviors, in particular whether exposure to emotional content led people to post content that was consistent with the exposure—thereby testing whether exposure to verbal affective expressions leads to similar verbal expressions, a form of emotional contagion. People who viewed Facebook in English were qualified for selection into the experiment. Two parallel experiments were conducted for positive and negative emotion: One in which exposure to friends’ positive emotional content in their News Feed was reduced, and one in which exposure to negative emotional content in their News Feed was reduced. In these conditions, when a person loaded their News Feed, posts that contained emotional content of the relevant emotional valence, each emotional post had between a 10% and 90% chance (based on their User ID) of being omitted from their News Feed for that specific viewing.

And here’s their central finding:

What the figure shows is that, in the experimental conditions, where negative or positive emotional posts are censored, users produce correspondingly more positive or negative emotional words in their own status updates. Reducing the number of negative emotional posts users saw led those users to produce more positive, and fewer negative words (relative to the unmodified control condition); conversely, reducing the number of presented positive posts led users to produce more negative and fewer positive words of their own.

Taken at face value, these results are interesting and informative. For the sake of contextualizing the concerns I discuss below, though, two points are worth noting. First, these effects, while highly statistically significant, are tiny. The largest effect size reported had a Cohen’s d of 0.02–meaning that eliminating a substantial proportion of emotional content from a user’s feed had the monumental effect of shifting that user’s own emotional word use by two hundredths of a standard deviation. In other words, the manipulation had a negligible real-world impact on users’ behavior. To put it in intuitive terms, the effect of condition in the Facebook study is roughly comparable to a hypothetical treatment that increased the average height of the male population in the United States by about one twentieth of an inch (given a standard deviation of ~2.8 inches). Theoretically interesting, perhaps, but not very meaningful in practice.

Second, the fact that users in the experimental conditions produced content with very slightly more positive or negative emotional content doesn’t mean that those users actually felt any differently. It’s entirely possible–and I would argue, even probable–that much of the effect was driven by changes in the expression of ideas or feelings that were already on users’ minds. For example, suppose I log onto Facebook intending to write a status update to the effect that I had an “awesome day today at the beach with my besties!” Now imagine that, as soon as I log in, I see in my news feed that an acquaintance’s father just passed away. I might very well think twice about posting my own message–not necessarily because the news has made me feel sad myself, but because it surely seems a bit unseemly to celebrate one’s own good fortune around people who are currently grieving. I would argue that such subtle behavioral changes, while certainly responsive to others’ emotions, shouldn’t really be considered genuine cases of emotional contagion. Yet given how small the effects were, one wouldn’t need very many such changes to occur in order to produce the observed results. So, at the very least, the jury should still be out on the extent to which Facebook users actually feel differently as a result of this manipulation.

The concerns

Setting aside the rather modest (though still interesting!) results, let’s turn to look at the criticism. Here’s what Katy Waldman, writing in a Slate piece titled “Facebook’s Unethical Experiment“, had to say:

The researchers, who are affiliated with Facebook, Cornell, and the University of California““San Francisco, tested whether reducing the number of positive messages people saw made those people less likely to post positive content themselves. The same went for negative messages: Would scrubbing posts with sad or angry words from someone’s Facebook feed make that person write fewer gloomy updates?

…

The upshot? Yes, verily, social networks can propagate positive and negative feelings!

The other upshot: Facebook intentionally made thousands upon thousands of people sad.

Or consider an article in the The Wire, quoting Jacob Silverman:

“What’s disturbing about how Facebook went about this, though, is that they essentially manipulated the sentiments of hundreds of thousands of users without asking permission (blame the terms of service agreements we all opt into). This research may tell us something about online behavior, but it’s undoubtedly more useful for, and more revealing of, Facebook’s own practices.”

On Twitter, the reaction to the study has been similarly negative). A lot of people appear to be very upset at the revelation that Facebook would actively manipulate its users’ news feeds in a way that could potentially influence their emotions.

Why the concerns are misplaced

To my mind, the concerns expressed in the Slate piece and elsewhere are misplaced, for several reasons. First, they largely mischaracterize the study’s experimental procedures–to the point that I suspect most of the critics haven’t actually bothered to read the paper. In particular, the suggestion that Facebook “manipulated users’ emotions” is quite misleading. Framing it that way tacitly implies that Facebook must have done something specifically designed to induce a different emotional experience in its users. In reality, for users assigned to the experimental condition, Facebook simply removed a variable proportion of status messages that were automatically detected as containing positive or negative emotional words. Let me repeat that: Facebook removed emotional messages for some users. It did not, as many people seem to be assuming, add content specifically intended to induce specific emotions. Now, given that a large amount of content on Facebook is already highly emotional in nature–think about all the people sharing their news of births, deaths, break-ups, etc.–it seems very hard to argue that Facebook would have been introducing new risks to its users even if it had presented some of them with more emotional content. But it’s certainly not credible to suggest that replacing 10% – 90% of emotional content with neutral content constitutes a potentially dangerous manipulation of people’s subjective experience.

Second, it’s not clear what the notion that Facebook users’ experience is being “manipulated” really even means, because the Facebook news feed is, and has always been, a completely contrived environment. I hope that people who are concerned about Facebook “manipulating” user experience in support of research realize that Facebook is constantly manipulating its users’ experience. In fact, by definition, every single change Facebook makes to the site alters the user experience, since there simply isn’t any experience to be had on Facebook that isn’t entirely constructed by Facebook. When you log onto Facebook, you’re not seeing a comprehensive list of everything your friends are doing, nor are you seeing a completely random subset of events. In the former case, you would be overwhelmed with information, and in the latter case, you’d get bored of Facebook very quickly. Instead, what you’re presented with is a carefully curated experience that is, from the outset, crafted in such a way as to create a more engaging experience (read: keeps you spending more time on the site, and coming back more often). The items you get to see are determined by a complex and ever-changing algorithm that you make only a partial contribution to (by indicating what you like, what you want hidden, etc.). It has always been this way, and it’s not clear that it could be any other way. So I don’t really understand what people mean when they sarcastically suggest–as Katy Waldman does in her Slate piece–that “Facebook reserves the right to seriously bum you out by cutting all that is positive and beautiful from your news feed”. Where does Waldman think all that positive and beautiful stuff comes from in the first place? Does she think it spontaneously grows wild in her news feed, free from the meddling and unnatural influence of Facebook engineers?

Third, if you were to construct a scale of possible motives for manipulating users’ behavior–with the global betterment of society at one end, and something really bad at the other end–I submit that conducting basic scientific research would almost certainly be much closer to the former end than would the other standard motives we find on the web–like trying to get people to click on more ads. The reality is that Facebook–and virtually every other large company with a major web presence–is constantly conducting large controlled experiments on user behavior. Data scientists and user experience researchers at Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. routinely run dozens, hundreds, or thousands of experiments a day, all of which involve random assignment of users to different conditions. Typically, these manipulations aren’t conducted in order to test basic questions about emotional contagion; they’re conducted with the explicit goal of helping to increase revenue. In other words, if the idea that Facebook would actively try to manipulate your behavior bothers you, you should probably stop reading this right now and go close your account. You also should definitely not read this paper suggesting that a single social message on Facebook prior to the last US presidential election the may have single-handedly increased national voter turn-out by as much as 0.6%). Oh, and you should probably also stop using Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Twitter, Amazon, and pretty much every other major website–because I can assure you that, in every single case, there are people out there who get paid a good salary to… yes, manipulate your emotions and behavior! For better or worse, this is the world we live in. If you don’t like it, you can abandon the internet, or at the very least close all of your social media accounts. But the suggestion that Facebook is doing something unethical simply by publishing the results of one particular experiment among thousands–and in this case, an experiment featuring a completely innocuous design that, if anything, is probably less motivated by a profit motive than most of what Facebook does–seems kind of absurd.

Fourth, it’s worth keeping in mind that there’s nothing intrinsically evil about the idea that large corporations might be trying to manipulate your experience and behavior. Everybody you interact with–including every one of your friends, family, and colleagues–is constantly trying to manipulate your behavior in various ways. Your mother wants you to eat more broccoli; your friends want you to come get smashed with them at a bar; your boss wants you to stay at work longer and take fewer breaks. We are always trying to get other people to feel, think, and do certain things that they would not otherwise have felt, thought, or done. So the meaningful question is not whether people are trying to manipulate your experience and behavior, but whether they’re trying to manipulate you in a way that aligns with or contradicts your own best interests. The mere fact that Facebook, Google, and Amazon run experiments intended to alter your emotional experience in a revenue-increasing way is not necessarily a bad thing if in the process of making more money off you, those companies also improve your quality of life. I’m not taking a stand one way or the other, mind you, but simply pointing out that without controlled experimentation, the user experience on Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. would probably be very, very different–and most likely less pleasant. So before we lament the perceived loss of all those “positive and beautiful” items in our Facebook news feeds, we should probably remind ourselves that Facebook’s ability to identify and display those items consistently is itself in no small part a product of its continual effort to experimentally test its offering by, yes, experimentally manipulating its users’ feelings and thoughts.

What makes the backlash on this issue particularly strange is that I’m pretty sure most people do actually realize that their experience on Facebook (and on other websites, and on TV, and in restaurants, and in museums, and pretty much everywhere else) is constantly being manipulated. I expect that most of the people who’ve been complaining about the Facebook study on Twitter are perfectly well aware that Facebook constantly alters its user experience–I mean, they even see it happen in a noticeable way once in a while, whenever Facebook introduces a new interface. Given that Facebook has over half a billion users, it’s a foregone conclusion that every tiny change Facebook makes to the news feed or any other part of its websites induces a change in millions of people’s emotions. Yet nobody seems to complain about this much–presumably because, when you put it this way, it seems kind of silly to suggest that a company whose business model is predicated on getting its users to use its product more would do anything other than try to manipulate its users into, you know, using its product more.

Why the backlash is deeply counterproductive

Now, none of this is meant to suggest that there aren’t legitimate concerns one could raise about Facebook’s more general behavior–or about the immense and growing social and political influence that social media companies like Facebook wield. One can certainly question whether it’s really fair to expect users signing up for a service like Facebook’s to read and understand user agreements containing dozens of pages of dense legalese, or whether it would make sense to introduce new regulations on companies like Facebook to ensure that they don’t acquire or exert undue influence on their users’ behavior (though personally I think that would be unenforceable and kind of silly). So I’m certainly not suggesting that we give Facebook, or any other large web company, a free pass to do as it pleases. What I am suggesting, however, is that even if your real concerns are, at bottom, about the broader social and political context Facebook operates in, using this particular study as a lightning rod for criticism of Facebook is an extremely counterproductive, and potentially very damaging, strategy.

Consider: by far the most likely outcome of the backlash Facebook is currently experiencing is that, in future, its leadership will be less likely to allow its data scientists to publish their findings in the scientific literature. Remember, Facebook is not a research institute expressly designed to further understanding of the human condition; it’s a publicly-traded corporation that exists to create wealth for its shareholders. Facebook doesn’t have to share any of its data or findings with the rest of the world if it doesn’t want to; it could comfortably hoard all of its knowledge and use it for its own ends, and no one else would ever be any wiser for it. The fact that Facebook is willing to allow its data science team to spend at least some of its time publishing basic scientific research that draws on Facebook’s unparalleled resources is something to be commended, not criticized.

There is little doubt that the present backlash will do absolutely nothing to deter Facebook from actually conducting controlled experiments on its users, because A/B testing is a central component of pretty much every major web company’s business strategy at this point–and frankly, Facebook would be crazy not to try to empirically determine how to improve user experience. What criticism of the Kramer et al article will almost certainly do is decrease the scientific community’s access to, and interaction with, one of the largest and richest sources of data on human behavior in existence. You can certainly take a dim view of Facebook as a company if you like, and you’re free to critique the way they do business to your heart’s content. But haranguing Facebook and other companies like it for publicly disclosing scientifically interesting results of experiments that it is already constantly conducting anyway–and that are directly responsible for many of the positive aspects of the user experience–is not likely to accomplish anything useful. If anything, it’ll only ensure that, going forward, all of Facebook’s societally relevant experimental research is done in the dark, where nobody outside the company can ever find out–or complain–about it.

[UPDATE July 1st: I’ve posted some additional thoughts in a second post here.]

elsewhere on the internets…

Some stuff I’ve found interesting in the last week or two:

Nicholas Felton released his annual report of… himself. It’s a personal annual report on Felton, as seen through the eyes of a bunch of friends, family, and strangers:

Each day in 2009, I asked every person with whom I had a meaningful encounter to submit a record of this meeting through an online survey. These reports form the heart of the 2009 Annual Report. From parents to old friends, to people I met for the first time, to my dentist“¦ any time I felt that someone had discerned enough of my personality and activities, they were given a card with a URL and unique number to record their experience.

You probably don’t much care about Nicholas Felton’s relationships, moods, or diet, but it’s a neat idea that’s really well executed. And it looks great [via Flowing Data].

Hackademe is a serialized novel about a man, with an axe, who dislikes professors enough to take them out behind the wood shed and… alright, no, it’s actually “a website devoted to sharing clever uses of technology, software, or modified items to solve problems related to information overload, time management, organization, productivity, and other challenges faced by academics on a daily basis.” Which is pretty cool, except that I have trouble seeing the word “hackademic” in a positive light…

The UK’s General Medical Council finally laid the smack down on the ethically-challenged Andrew Wakefield–he of “vaccines cause autism, and here’s a terrible and possibly fraudulent study to prove it” fame. There’s a very long but very good write-up of the whole debacle here. Unfortunately, the reprimand is really just symbolic at this point, because Wakefield now lives in the US, and isn’t (officially) practicing medicine any more. Instead, he spends his days pumping autistic children full of laxatives. I wish I were joking.

The Neuroskeptic has had a string of great posts in the last couple of weeks. I particularly enjoyed this one, wherein he exposes reveals himself to be an expert on all matters sexual, dopaminergic, and British.

According to a study in Nature, running barefoot may be better for our feet than running in shoes. Turns out that barefoot runners strike the ground with the middle or ball of the foot, greatly reducing the force of impact. This may explain why so many (shod) runners get injured every year, and is supposed to make sense to you if you’re one of those evolutionist folks who think humans evolved to run long distances over the course of millions of years. But since you and I both know god created shoes around the same time he was borrowing Adam’s ribs, we can dispense with that sort of silliness.

The Census Bureau has some ‘splaining to do. Over at Freakonomics, Justin Wolfers discusses a new paper that uncovers massive (and inadvertent) problems with large chunks of census data. The fact that the census bureau screwed up isn’t terribly surprising (though it does call a number of published findings into question); everyone who works with data makes mistakes now and then, and the Census Bureau works with most data than most people. What is surprising is that Census has apparently refused to correct the problem, which is going to leave a lot of people hanging.

Slime mold has evolved the capacity to plan metropolitan transit systems! So claims a study in last week’s issue of Science. Ok, that’s not exactly what the article shows. What Tero et al. do show is that slime mold naturally forms networks that have a structure with comparable efficiency to the Tokyo rail system. Which, if you think about it, kind of does mean that slime mold has the capacity to plan metropolitan transit systems.

Projection Point is a neat website that measures something its creators term your “Risk Intelligence Quotient”. What’s interesting is that the site measures meta-cognitive judgments about risk rather than risk attitudes. In other words, it measures how much you know about how much you know, rather than how much you know. If that sounds confusing, spend 5 minutes answering 50 questions, and all will be made clear.

Pete Warden wants to divide up the US into 7 distinct chunks. Or at least, he wants to tell you how FaceBook thinks the US should be divided up, based on social connections between people in different geographic locations. There’s Stayathomia, Mormonia, and Socialistan. (Names have been deliberately altered to protect the guilty states.)

Each day in 2009, I asked every person with whom I had a meaningful encounter to submit a record of this meeting through an online survey. These reports form the heart of the 2009 Annual Report. From parents to old friends, to people I met for the first time, to my dentist“¦ any time I felt that someone had discerned enough of my personality and activities, they were given a card with a URL and unique number to record their experience.