Facebook: To over one-billion people it’s a part of everyday life. A forum to share embarrassing photos, weird hobbies and profound philosophical musings about what you’re having for breakfast.

But now Facebook has recently come under fire for allowing scientists to conduct a study on almost 700,000 users.

An open-access study by US researchers, published earlier this month sought to study ’emotional contagion’, the idea that ’emotional states can be transferred to others’.

Essentially, the researchers selectively removed posts that were emotionally negative from one set of users’ news feeds, and positive posts from another set of users. This left the two groups exposed largely to either positive or negative posts.

The researchers then wanted to see how this affected their language (whether it became more positive or negative – the results showed modest changes in parallel with the language they were exposed to (i.e. people exposed to more negative news used negative word more frequently, and positive words less frequently, each by about 0.1%).

But the real controversy surrounding this research is whether it is ethical to try to change a person’s emotional expression without them knowing.

Selling ourselves to social media

We must remember, of course, that Facebook is a multi-billion dollar company, offering its software and servers to users free of monetary charge. I think that most users, when they sign up, expect that Facebook will somehow try to make money out of them – mostly through advertising.

It is also worth remembering, that although you retain copyright of any media you upload (photos, videos etc.) Facebook is granted licence ‘to use any IP content that you post’. You also give them permission to ‘share information (they) receive’ with affiliates.

So maybe we should view our relationships with Facebook as a transaction: We get to use their software and in return they get to use our posts, our activities and, ultimately divert our collective gaze towards paying advertisers.

Why would anyone care about my posts?

So far, so gravy, but how does this fit into the arena of scientific research? Well social media provide reams of data for researchers looking at how people communicate, interact and portray themselves. So it is perhaps no surprise that many studies use data collected from Facebook to study subjects such as language, relationships and psychology.

It should be said at this point that other social networks are also used for this sort of purpose, and that in most, if not all studies, participants are volunteers, either through directly responding to questionnaires or by volunteering data through apps (although this means of gaining permission does seem rather surreptitious).

Does this research cross a line?

There is a difference between the type of research mentioned above, and the one at the centre of the current furore: The studies mentioned above are largely passive – participants get on with their Facebooking as normal, and the researchers simply observe their activity.

In this study, the research was conducted to directly influence the people taking part, and was done so without their knowledge.

While many people might consider the observation of their online activity as an invasion of their privacy, it can be argued that if you don’t want something to become seen by the whole world, then you shouldn’t put it on Facebook in the first place.

We should probably expect that our exchanges in a forum as open as Facebook (even with high privacy settings), can still potentially leak out into the wider social mediasphere and therefore exercise a degree of caution and sensibility when choosing what to upload and what to say – even if we are led to believe that the exchange is private.

However, I believe the majority of Facebook users would not expect to be manipulated in this way – with researchers actively seeking to change their emotional responses – and that is where this research crosses the ethical boundary in my opinion.

If someone participates in a clinical trial, they are told what drug they are being given and what it does. This is the equivalent of releasing a drug into drinking water without people’s knowledge and seeing what effect it has on them.

This analogy may seem heavy-handed – after all, the effect of the research appears to be minimal (it’s not as if they drove anyone to suicide by exposing them to negative news) – but the principle remains that it was an active intervention performed without the knowledge of the test subjects, and this sort of behaviour has the potential to undermine trust in researchers and science in general.

What does it mean for science in general?

Cutting-edge research will almost inevitably provoke controversy, from GM to embryonic stem-cells to animal testing. In these cases, there is a disconnect between the natural emotional feelings of every human being, and the cold, logical objectivity that must be applied to achieve rigorous science and advance our understanding and technology.

This disconnect is likely to forever perpetuate the irony that as much as the public supports and arguably craves scientific advancement, it will continue to be disgusted and appalled by some the methods that are necessary to achieve it.

Because of this, scientists in certain fields will have to continue to tread on eggshells and battle through red tape in order to carry out their work.

It is for this reason that maintaining ethical integrity in science is paramount – legislation that outlaws or hinders certain scientific practices or areas of research is often influenced by public opinion (for instance, religious lobbies restricting embryonic stem cell research).

So if public trust in research is eroded, for whatever reason, then more moral scrutiny, more bureaucracy and more restrictions will be placed on researchers, and ultimately this will slow down progress.

So scientists must therefore be wary of crossing ethical lines and be careful not to evoke the public’s ire. Even though a piece of research may appear to be harmless to the unknowing test subjects, the consequences for the image of science in general can be considerably damaging.

All images are open-source/Creative Commons licence.

Credit: J Melo (First); Enoc vt (Second); R Ochoa (Third);

J Stephens (Fourth).

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