Chrome plugin lets users experience the controversial research which explored whether negative or positive emotions spread to other users

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Thought you missed out on having your emotions tweaked by Facebook’s mood manipulation back in 2012? This free Chrome plugin is for you.

The brand new Facebook Mood Manipulator Chrome extension gives users the power to control their emotions by modifying their Facebook news feeds accordingly.

“Why should Zuckerberg get to decide how you feel? Take back control,” says Lauren McCarthy, the New York-based developer of the plugin on her site.

As positive as it gets Photograph: Lauren McCarthy

Installing the plugin gives users four sliders for positive, emotional, aggressive and open emotions, which use the same system that Facebook used for its emotional contagion study, called Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC), to analyse the words in posts and remove those that don’t fit within the selected parameters.

“Aw yes, we are all freaked about the ethics of the Facebook study. And then what?” asks McCarthy. “What implications does this finding have for what we might do with our technologies? What would you do with an interface to your emotions?”

Feeling sad. Photograph: Lauren McCarthy

Users will be able to conduct experiments on themselves to see how they feel over time. It could revolutionise the Facebook experience to a much happier, brighter one. Or it could do absolutely nothing.

Either way, users can now “leverage Facebook's own research to manipulate your emotions on your terms.”

• Facebook can tweak our emotions and make us vote. What else can it do?