A psychological experiment conducted by Facebook Inc. on its users two years ago could have been handled better, its chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg conceded on Tuesday, as the company tried to fend off criticism over the experiment that influenced what certain users saw in their news feed.

In 2012, the world’s largest social networking site conducted a study that temporarily influenced nearly 700,000 users globally saw on their news feeds.

Details of the study emerged recently, raising privacy fears and questions over how Facebook could have conducted the study without the seeking the consent of users.

It has prompted regulators in the UK to launch a probe over whether Facebook broke data protection laws by conducting the study without the permission of users.

“To address this specific issue, we communicated really badly on this subject. We regret how this was communicated because people are concerned and we never want them to be concerned," said Sandberg during a media round table with reporters.

“This was a one-week study a long time ago and it was like any product, testing different aspects of a product so that we could provide instant communication on it."

Sandberg said that Facebook was working closely with regulators across the world and that the social networking site was fully in compliance with privacy laws.

“We work very closely with regulators all over the world. We are fully in compliance with the laws," said Sandberg, who is in India meeting policymakers and leaders of top Indian companies such as Hindustan Unilever Ltd.

“We take privacy very seriously and that is the hallmark of our service."

The study attempted to find out whether Facebook could alter the emotional state of users and thus influence them to post either more positive or negative comments.

Facebook’s data scientists tried out the experiment for a week in January 2012 and as part of the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, changed the number of positive or negative comments that users saw on their news feeds of articles and photos.

Given Facebook’s elaborate influence across the globe where it reaches more than 1 billion active users, the news feed experiment has raised concerns over privacy and over the social network’s ability to influence users’ thinking and moods.

Sandberg insisted Facebook had not made any changes to content on the news feeds of users they had experimented on.

“We don’t produce content—we’re not a newspaper," said Sandberg. “There’s nothing we’re trying to push at people. We’re just trying to give you the best of what you see. People you message more, you see their posts more often. Posts you engage with, you see more often. If you engage with fewer people, Facebook shows fewer people. None of this has a political point of view."

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