Enough is enough

Facebook recently announced that it will be changing its methodology on how it conducts experiments on users. It plans on adding internal reviews and provide its researchers with additional guidance before allowing them to conduct an experiment. It didn’t not offer any more specific details on the new standards that it plans on introducing within the company. Even though Facebook announced the new standards, critics still believe the steps are inadequate and require finer tuning. Majority of researches believe that the company needs more action to improve Research ethics & Research law in order to avoid such an incident in the future. This entire fiasco came to light in June when an experimented conducted by the company’s researchers altered the news feed of approximately 700,000 users by removing some of the posts with either positive or negative content. The idea was to study how emotions spread on the social network from a person to person.

The fiasco caused a furor among the users & by other researchers because the company didn’t notify the users who were manipulated as part of the assignment. Usually researchers have to follow a certain level of caution & take certain steps to notify the test subjects before performing the experiment. Outsiders weren’t surprised to learn from researchers who have worked at Facebook in the past that there is no internal review process before conducting an experiment or study. Facebook announced that it plans on creating an internal review panel consisting of senior researchers. It also plans on providing each of its data scientist with clearer guidelines in order to avoid a situation like the one in June again. Facebook announced that it will consult with several outside researchers & universities for suggestions while coming up with the guidelines. Senior Facebook officials were caught off guard to learn about the public backlash caused by the emotions experiment. Mike Schroepfer, CTO of Facebook argued that the findings of the experiment countered assertions that positive posts might make other users feel bad.

           

         Critics continue to point out that even though the company announced that it will be using new sets of standards & regulations, there is no guarantee that the company and its researchers will act on them. The company does not publish or share the results of its research with the general public or outside researchers. There is nothing legally speaking to stop the company for continuing its research the same way it has been doing all along. This is not the first time experiments on its own user base have come to light on the internet. Companies often use users to figure out how they will react when presented information in a variety of ways frequently for marketing purposes. Advertisement companies also perform certain experiments to figure out how to use targeted ads. The amount of user data from social networking companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. is a perfect source for conducting research. A lot of the times even universities access the data from technology companies for academic researches. It’s a well-known fact that MIT has access to all of the tweets from Twitter for research use. It is unknown what kind of privacy measures are been taken into account by Twitter before sending the data over to MIT.

         

       I like many other critics believe that the steps taken by Facebook is just a start in the right direction. There’s a long way to go before the company can be considered an industry leader in conducting research responsibly. It also needs to make the entire research process more transparent so that the user base has a clear idea of how their data is being utilized by the company. Even though the users agreed to let Facebook use their data in any shape or form when they made an account with the social networking site, they should ask for user content before exposing them to any experiment or research study. Using the Terms of Service in the fine print as the sole reason is not ethical enough to give Facebook or any other company unprecedented freedom to expose its user base to experiments even if it’s legal. There will be no difference between a human being and a lab rat if the users don’t raise their voice against the actions of these companies.