ESO and Huge Guilds

 I recently noticed something that I am sure has been obvious to many people who play The Elder Scrolls Online for some time--that, although in-game, guilds are limited to 500 accounts, by using Discord you can effectively have guilds that are much larger.

How does this work? So for instance, you might have the Netch Lords, with almost 500 people and officers. The officers decide to make Netch Lords II. The officers are the same in both in-game groups (well, technically, guilds, but they are the same guild). The guild hall is the same (this is a long story as it differs from WoW, with no housing, and EQ2, with both houses and slightly distinct guild halls--in ESO a player buys a large house and shares access with everyone in their guild, thus, a guild hall). The members, however, are different (although sure besides the officers there could be regular members who are in both, as you can belong in up to five guilds). This means that, for instance, the in-game guild chats are distinct. Yes, officers make announcements to all the guild groups. And guild events can and do include everyone from each of the guild groups. But, the important thing is, that members of both groups (or however many guild-groups there are, I'm in one guild that is the fourth grouping, so like Netch Lords IV, and there are three previous guild-groups, each with about 500 members), are all members of the same Discord server. So all Netch Lord guild members (I, II, III, etc.), have a shared communication channel via Discord. Communication and community are inexorably intertwined (and as you can see they share the same root in English, from Latin). 

I'm not really sure how to label such groups, although that isn't a big deal and they exist whether there are clear labels and distinctions. The world is beautifully complex, there are grey areas. What I mean is, if you just have the Netch Lords, you can say "this thing here is a guild." But if you also have Netch Lords II and III and there's a Discord, then the Netch Lords I is a guild but not in the way it would be without NLII and NLIII. You could say "there is a guild, called the Netch Lords, and it is comprised of three... things... guild groupings within ESO, and there is one Discord server for all of them, and that's in part why we consider these three in-game 'guilds' as one, larger guild." Possibly players have come up with good terminology for this kind of thing, perhaps in Reddit or in-game.

So, you end up with guilds that are quite a bit larger than 500 people, although they are not exactly the same as one singular guild in some ways. Some of my previous work looked at large guilds in ESO and only considered singular large guilds, I see I missed this aspect, although the findings for how guild leaders manage large guilds, from my experience so far in two large 500+ guilds, seem to hold.

(I made up the name Netch Lords, the Netch is a floating sky-jellyfish originally from the game Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, and it is also in ESO. If there is a guild with such a name, my example here is not trying to be reflective of it.)

The End of Google

Google used to have a mantra, as much as massive global corporations can have mantras: "don't be evil." But the people in charge got rid of it after 18 years. It was now okay to be evil. 

More recently, they hired Timnit Gebru to focus on ethical AI issues, yet when she did, they fired her. Apparently, the people in charge of Google's AI want unethical AI.

And on a more personally noticeable level, they changed their mobile search app. No longer is it streamlined and simple, emphasizing speed and focus and, one hoped, accuracy and usefulness of the results. Now it's a news app with a general search function included. This in itself is not a huge problem, what they pass off as news is. About half of the stories are trashy clickbait, not designed to inform but instead designed to manipulate the inbuilt curiosity of the human mind and create "engagement" and advertising revenue. So it's no longer about providing reliable and useful information to the user, it's about providing the user to the advertisers. Much like was said of television advertising, "if the product is free, you're the product."

How this is not a major blow to their original branding, I don't know. Perhaps the DoubleClick people have taken over and they don't care. At this rate, I am seriously debating dropping Chrome completely, I had started using it years ago for its security features. 

I don't mean that Google will suddenly cease to exist. The Google we used to have, however, is gone. The thing with the search app is so upsetting, and the clickbait is so trashy and so transparent, that I am motivated to write a blog post about it. You know it's bad if I'm writing about it. 

Amazon Still Thinks I'm A Student

It's been over five and a half years, and multiple complaints, but Amazon still insists on showing me Amazon Prime advertisements. I've told them directly that I am not a student (the funniest response was "the student flag on your account is on", of course there is no such flag, why the text chat person felt like lying, I don't know), so they have the data that I am not a student. Apparently they don't really want all the data; they just don't care.

Here is the latest screen grab from this week:

The Internet, Phonebooks, and Privacy

A really interesting statement from Xfinity/Comcast:

We will no longer make available any directory listing information about our Xfinity Voice customers through ecolisting.com, directory assistance, or print publications. This includes names, phone numbers, and addresses. We also will not share any of this information with third-party publishers.
We're making this change as part of our ongoing commitment to enhance customer privacy. 

Why is this so interesting? It speaks directly to the issue of unforeseen social consequences and new technology.

Early in the days of pushing the information revolution, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a lot of idea about information and change were bandied about. Two of them, relevant here, were easier access to information generally with phone numbers and addresses as an example, and the other was the end of the paper phone book (saving lots of trees, it was said, more marketing and less fact).

Starting with the paper phone book, well there are giant paper phone books from who knows what advertising-driven company delivered to my door every year. When I lived in NYC, trucks would roll around the city and low-paid workers would deposit phone books on everyone's stoops. I've received them here in Massachusetts as well in the last year. So, no, the phone book did not go away, although the companies, its specific name, and its economic model are very different from AT&T's yellow pages of the 1970s and 1980s that were completely necessary back then.

But free access to information online didn't work out either: when you try to look someone up online, unless they have put their contact information up themselves, it's often paywalled and the Google results usually look pretty dodgy. If you get an unknown phone call (my recent ones are "from" Chicago and Michigan [they almost always fake the source phone number] and feature a recorded message in Chinese with music in the background, which says something about the economics of the phone-spam industry reaching out to non-English speakers in the US) and you Google the number to do a reverse lookup (a simple database operation), it is often very hard to get any information at all, although this could be because the number that shows up on your caller ID isn't actually in service. The point is, you can't actually look people up easily unless they are fairly digitally oriented.

So, we still have paper phone books, but they are not exactly the paper phone books from 40 years ago, and we still can't look people or phone numbers up online (I am tempted to mention the "where's my flying car?" trope, but we have flying cars, it's just that we call them helicopters and they are incredibly more complex than today's regular cars), and, to come back to Xfinity, maybe we don't even want this information available--when it was merely in a paper phonebook, restricted to who had access to those phonebooks, that was one thing, but in today's digital world where Macedonian teenagers can make websites devoted to fake news stories (which are shared to Facebook or via Twitter and then can make their way up the news hierarchy to actual televised news shows), maybe having easy access to everything is not the best idea. (I'll avoid a tangent to how newspapers, despite being driven by advertising revenue, still mostly cared about the advertisements they ran in their pages, but Facebook and Twitter don't see it that way.)

Facebook and Cambridge Analytical Screwed Up, But Not How You Think

Facebook: Open for Advertising, Open for Business

There’s a huge kerfuffle over the recent revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a political research and advertising firm, used data from millions of Facebook accounts in order to build behavioral profiles and then, using those profiling models, advertise to people and manipulate their voting behavior.

People are upset over this, but, it’s not for the reasons that most people are talking about, that is, it isn’t that either Facebook or Cambridge Analytica behaved unethically. They didn’t. They behaved exactly as they were supposed to. The mistake they made was that Facebook users were reminded of how it all works.

What do I mean?

Let’s back up a minute, and look at both Facebook’s business model and also how advertising works.

Facebook is a social networking site, where you can connect with lots of people. That’s not a business model—there is no mention of how the rent is paid (salaries, their giant electrical bill, money to buy new servers and replace old ones). The business model is actually a very old one, one that’s been around for decades: advertising. As any old-school American television scholar will tell you, “If the product is free, you are the product.” This has been true for broadcast television and radio for decades. But as television offerings and the idea of “radio” have complexified, the idea “over-the-air” broadcasting has been somewhat forgotten: many people get their local, i.e., broadcast, television via cable, satellite, or the internet. The local airwave component is not part of that picture even though it’s still there.

The advertising industry, for decades, has wanted perfect consumer profiles for each and every individual. This way they can advertise to you perfectly. “Advertise” is just a polite word for manipulate. Yes, manipulate. Not influence, not coerce, but manipulate. It’s behavioral propaganda. Credit card data and frequent shopper cards were a good start, but the internet, once it reached the right scale, was a bonanza of behavioral data. With big data capabilities, perfect advertising may finally be within reach.

Most advertising that we think about is consumer-based, trying to get you to buy a product. Yes, you, buy this. That’s the idea. It is that basic. And political advertising is exactly the same: behavioral acceptance of a product. But in this case, your behavior is voting, not buying, and the product is a politician, not a good or service (that could be argued but doesn’t matter). It’s the same: advertisements try to manipulate your behavior to the advertiser’s desired outcome.

There is one other important aspect to advertising: that you not think about the advertising. And that’s where the failure is for Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. When you think about the advertising and how it really works, you realize you are the product. If you realize your vote, which is supposed to be sacrosanct, can be manipulated, then it throws into question what you might want to think about democracy and free will. (If you do not live in a democracy, this explanation probably seems short-sighted.) Capitalism is triumphing over democracy, and it’s not supposed to be that way.

Except, it is. Facebook thrives on a user-based advertising model where you are the product. All of your data and access to you is sold to advertisers, or, if Facebook can keep your data, Facebook itself can make all the behavioral models and then sell access to you (the advertisers will still need to make the “right” advertisements, but Facebook will provide the “right” people). Advertising works by showing you what will manipulate you into the desired behavior, be it buying or voting—they’re the same, it’s just a selection on your part.

Facebook will continue to make its service available for free to users, and can do so because the users are the product. Again, this is not new. Facebook sells access to its users to advertisers with precision targeting because Facebook has so much data about your behaviors and preferences, and although there are other financial models this is the one Facebook is currently using. Advertisers try to manipulate your preferences and behaviors based on your past preferences and behaviors.

None of this is new. (Suddenly, my media studies degree is looking pretty hot!)

Where they screwed up was that users remembered that they, the users, were the product, and that they, the users, were the subject of manipulation in the political domain where an individual’s voting preference is supposed to be pristine, determined solely by the voter, beyond manipulation and not for sale. Except, that isn’t true. Just most of the time we don’t want to think about it.

Addendum 1: Google's business model is also advertising.
Addendum 2: Zuckerberg's first website.

Google Search and Coffee

Google search, via Google Maps, gives some bizarre results for "coffee", as you can see with these three result sets. (And now Blogger is being horrible with layout, yes, I know, Medium or something, but I started this blog a long time ago, switching costs.)

Here the search is just "coffee", so, obviously looking for somewhere to get coffee (perhaps in liquid form). You see Starbucks, which I am not a fan of, and at this zoom level there is one other name that is showing and a few results where the name of the location isn't shown.

I want something without Starbucks (which is the next search), but also note there is nothing showing in the triangle made by those roads there in the middle/left.

So, the same search, with "-starbucks" which should, I have been told, exclude Starbucks. Except it didn't do that -- it removed all results but one. Although I hadn't zoomed in on that previous search, I can tell you that not all the results were Starbucks. We know at least one result, on the left, was for "Pavement Coffeehouse", which is not a Starbucks. This search result is completely incorrect and thus rather useless. Notice there are still no results in the triangle space there in the middle/left.

So maybe you were wondering, "This is Boston, where are the Dunkin' Donuts!" Good question. Google wasn't showing them, despite Google's description of DD: "Chain known for donuts & coffee". So, right there, AND COFFEE. Yet DD is not a Google Maps result for "coffee", as shown above. (Although the pin shows a fork and knife, not a cup and saucer.)



So, what is going on?

1. Google appears to have not associated "coffee" with Dunkin' Donuts, which is wrong.
2. Google seems to think that "-starbucks" means "get rid of all results for things Google thinks are like starbucks", which is also just wrong.

In conclusion, you can't use Google Maps to search accurately for coffee.

Oh, Amazon (Student Prime)

Now Amazon is teaming up with Facebook to think I am a student. That two giant data companies that focus precisely on user demographics are incapable of realizing that I am not a student, despite my telling one of them several times that I am not (directly, talking with customer support human beings), is incredible.

Ok that was not the image in the advert initially (it was a student), but it appears to be what I captured. Try Amazon Prime Student. No, I am not a student, I don't qualify.

Still Data Fail

Amazon still thinks I'm a student, but for years I've told them I'm not. How is this a good use of customer data? How is this responsive to customers? It's insane and idiotic (and annoying when I am trying to give them my money, they make it harder to do so, but yes ok ok I am still an Amazon customer so what do they care?).

Here's a screen grab from this month, September 2016:


But I've told their online help people that I'm not a student, back in April as you can see here and previously in January of 2015 as you can see here. So much for customer feedback.

Additionally, Twitter's recommender needs some help:

Data & Society is an incorporated entity like Valvoline, but the two organizations are nothing alike and neither are their Twitter feeds. Valvoline isn't marked as a "sponsored" post (i.e., paid advertising), and even if it were the mismatch is just hilarious.

And currently I live in New York and I don't own a car.

The data is there, people just aren't using it well at all.

When Companies Fail The Data

Recently, I have encountered three examples of how giant data gathering companies have completely failed to use that data in any sensible way. The companies are Facebook, Amazon, and Pandora.

Facebook served me an ad that said Sylvester Stallone had died without actually using any direct "passed away" words or phrases (since he hadn't). This is offensive, it's a lie, and I am not a particular fan of Stallone's films although Rocky is a classic (but Cop Land, are you kidding me?).

Amazon continues to insist I might want Amazon Student, despite my explaining to them over a year ago that I am not a student (and my account is 16 years old). 

Pandora continues to serve me ads in Spanish (which I do speak but I'm not fluent) and for cars (I don't own a car). I even told a tech support person this and he said there was nothing he could do about it.

These examples all point to the issue of not using the data you have and not taking direct information (data) from the user when the user gives it to you (which is much easier than trying to infer it, if indeed the user is truthful). 

Facebook

The Facebook ad is hugely problematic. The conclusions are that:

1. The people at Facebook do not care about the accuracy of the ads they serve.
2. The people at Facebook do not care if the ads they serve are purely for emotional manipulation.
3. The people at Facebook are not using the 11 years of data they have on me to realize that I would not like this ad because:
1. I do not like advertisements that lie.
2. I do not like advertisements that manipulate.
3. I am not a fan of Sylvester Stallone.

They have the data. They aren't using it.

Amazon

That Amazon thinks I am student, even though I've told them I am not and even though they can see my account has been buying stuff for 16 years, is bizarre. I told a tech support person that I am not a student. Yet, the algorithm they maintain apparently is not given this information at all and continues to annoy me with an extra page when I am trying to check out (yes, a good problem to have). 

They have the data. They aren't using it.

Pandora

I grew up listening to FM radio, so I'm used to radio with ads. I so far use the free version of Pandora which has ads, and I think that's fine (people should get paid). However, I am not fluent in Spanish, so Spanish language ads are wasted on me (it's a waste of money to those advertisers) and also I don't own a car, but I get ads for car service stuff (I don't even remember what, but the problem is the same). So, since I think it would actually be nice to be served appropriate ads, and that those companies are getting their money's worth, I text-chatted with a Pandora text person. He said he had no way to mark my account indicating that I do not speak Spanish.

And yes, I know the image is an ad for Flonase, not for cars, it just happens to have a car--I use it here because it's in Spanish (although I am more complaining about the audio ads, images clearly work better here).

Again, they have the data. They aren't using it.

Overall

For me, these are good problems to have. I have internet access and can buy books (although if it's new I'll try to get it from my local non-chain bookstore -- yes I am serious). But all of these issues are annoying, not just because inappropriate content is being served to me, but that the companies should know better than to do that, and in all cases, they either have enough information on me, or I try to give it to them, and they still can't do it. And that's the distressing part: in this age of total information, some of the biggest information companies still don't know how to use data.

Case Study in Data Ethics at Data & Society

I am pleased to announce that a case study on data ethics, by myself and co-author Dr. Roei Davidson, has been published at Data & Society! Titled "The Ethics of Using Hacked Data: Patreon’s Data Hack and Academic Data Standards", we look at issues around using hacked data (or not).

Basically, no.

But I wanted to. See the paper for details! (It's free and concise, don't worry.)

Microsoft's Epic Twitterbot Fail

If you read this blog, you've read about the rather hilarious failure of Microsoft's experiment with a learning Twitter bot. Trolls gave it so much input it started turning out hateful, sexist, racist tweets.

So we really have to wonder...

1. Why are Microsoft engineers so ignorant of Internet culture?
2. Why Microsoft engineers who program text-based bots have no idea about the range of text available?

Because these are epic failures. Epic. No wonder there are jokes about engineers being completely socially inept.

AoIR 2015

Just spent a few days at AoIR 2015 in Phoenix! Note the hilarious typo ("indipendent") and we were not sure how that happened (it was discussed).

Theorizing the Web 2015

Theorizing the Web 2015 is on! Here in the Bowery (LES?), two days of presentations. Already made some contacts about work and am looking forward to tomorrow when some people I know will be keynoting!

Ignite Talks at Civic Hall: Great Stuff!

Omidyar Network hosted a great bunch of ignite talks (the crazy auto-slide-advancing ones) at Civic Hall on April 13th, including a few people I know which was exciting!

The Speakers:

• Laurenellen McCann Mo Open Data
• Tony Schloss Red Hook WIFI- The Realest Community Tech
• Miriam Altman The uphill battle to graduation day
• Chris Whong In Search of Hess' Triangle
• Rose Broome What is the Basic Income?
• Lane Becker Good Enough for Government Work?
• David Riordan The NYC Space/Time Directory: How The New York Public Library is unlocking NYC's past
• Gavin Weale SA Elections 2014: a youth odyssey
• Paul Lenz The Resilience of the Past
• Kathryn Peters Disrupting government
• Joel Mahoney Civic Technology and the Calculus of the Common Good
• Kate Krontiris Understanding America's Interested Bystander
• Nick Doiron The Civic Deep Web
• Jessie Braden Open Data Perils: Question Everything
• Daniel X. O'Neil Changing Civic Tech Culture from Projects to Products
• Daniel Latorre What I Learned About CivicTech from Eastern Europe
• Noel Hidalgo Clear eyes. Full heart. Can't Loose! NYC's civic tech in 2022.

Great topics, some great ideas, and some great slides.

Calvin and Hobbes and the Information Future

From 1996 or so. Nice.

This is of course Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson.

Horrible Web Ads

I am tired of horrible web ads, I am tired of women's images being used to manipulate curiosity and click throughs, and I am tired of pathetically transparent false geo-targeting, but it's kind of funny when it doesn't work.

And misuse of quotes. 'Rattled', what does that even mean?

(Mis)Information Propagation

"The One Dirty Little Secret About The Web You Don't Know!" Of course you probably do know it, and that's an intentionally horrible click-bait line. The reason you see Wikipedia's content scraped and represented in so many places is because people are too lazy to do the actual work required to do whatever it is they are trying to do (usually just make a buck). But this gets interesting, slightly, when the information is wrong.

My main, and it was going to be the sole, example was regarding the gas station / service station that does not exist around the corner from me here in Brooklyn, to which I was alerted by Apple maps. This is why I don't use Apple maps. I have reported it several times, and it is still there. They could use Google Street View to see very easily that there is no service station at that location (or anywhere near it), but whoever maintains that information does not care. Not at all. But first a quick few paragraphs about the iconic "ironworkers on a beam high above NYC" photo.

The Smithsonian Magazine, and note I love and respect the museum and a good friend of mine works at the museum, has an article about the photo. Which is great, except it's completely wrong. The man on the right of the beam isn't Patrick "Sonny" Glynn. "Pat Glynn is also the source for the identity of this worker, who he claims is his father, Patrick 'Sonny' Glynn." It's the grandfather of some friends of mine who I have known for over 30 years. (And if you look closely you can see he's missing part of a finger which he lost in a construction accident.)

To say that "for 80 years, the 11 ironworkers in the iconic photo have remained unknown" is horrible, because it's overselling, hype, and completely untrue. Just because the general public didn't know who those men were doesn't at all mean they were unknown. Just because there wasn't a source for the information didn't mean it was unknown. What does it mean to be unknown? By whom? Who gets to count as knowing?

As far as I can tell, the Smithsonian has not corrected this article at all, which is disappointing. However there was a fair amount of press one can find online from the same time, which I believe came about because a movie about the photo was released then.

Which brings us to Apple maps and the service station that is not in my neighborhood.

Here's the Apple maps image, from August 29th, 2014:

Yes the blue circle is approximately me. Note the "7th Ave Performance Center", at 121 7th ave there. There is no such commercial establishment there.

But the internet, well ok Google, will tell you there is:

(They're all purple because I clicked them.) These are the top ten results (somehow out of almost 5 million results, which makes no sense whatsoever). Nine of them are completely wrong. Only the second one gets it right (and I looked at this a few years ago when I had some small hope for Apple maps), because there is probably a service station down at 7121 7th avenue -- somewhere along the way, the leading 7 on the street address got lost, and site after site unthinkingly copies the error. (The second link there -- and I know it's a screenshot here -- also has the zip code correct.)

Which brings us to my overall annoyance. All these sites are just copying information. They don't particularly care if it's correct. That's really pathetic. Alright I have once again submitted it as an error, maybe I'll see one day if they correct it.

When Google Was Better

Google used to be about finding information for people (search), now it's about finding information on people (advertising).

Facebook used to be about keeping track of your friends (social), now it's about keeping track of your habits (advertising).

tldr: Public sphere, corruption thereof by advertising, Habermas. (That was a very heavily coded sentence using an academic concept and its author.)

Not Ok, Cupid

Regarding the recent Ok Cupid "study", there's a nice piece about both it and the horrible Facebook study you can read over at Kottke. One thing I like is that it essentially discusses the community in which FB posters exist, which is something I found an important and overlooked issue.

"It's not A/B testing. It's just being an asshole."

That Facebook Study on Manipulating Emotions

My Summary
People are instinctually driven to be a part of communities (thanks to evolution). Facebook wants to be our go-to place for easier communication with our communities (notice the similarity between those two words). We know that being a community member means celebrating the good and giving support when things are bad. By taking away both positive and negative posts, Facebook took away our ability to do that, and in doing so threatened our ability to take part in our communities, which not incorrectly is seen as a threat to our livelihood. That is a big part of the reaction here, and it's not getting the attention it deserves.

Let's be clear: the study was completely unethical, and it is horrifying that everyone involved was apparently blind to this obvious fact. Yes, obvious fact, and no it doesn't make it either non-obvious or not a fact that so many educated people missed, and continue to miss, this important point.

Some Links

1. The actual, rather short, paper about the study. 
2. A response at the AV Club, the first thing I learned about it.
3. A great piece at Tumbling Conduct. 
4. Another great piece at The Laboratorium, by James Grimmelmann. 
5. A great takedown of the methods at Psychcentral. 
6. Forbes wrote about it, and included the (lame) Facebook explanation from one of the authors.
7. A good blog post about the lack of informed consent and why it matters here.
8. A great NYTimes opinion piece by Jaron Lanier.
9. The not-quite retraction by the journal, an "Editorial Expression of Concern".
10. A lengthy write up at Science Based Medicine, quite good.
11. Statsblog has a guest post that is also worth reading.

(I am editing this over the course of Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday: reflection and thought are more important than speed of posting. And now Friday to add the "Editorial Expression of Concern" from PNAS.)

Terms of Service: They Don't Care
No one gave informed consent to this, and yes that matters. The Terms of Service is not informed consent. It is laughable to think it is. Some people are saying that because not all studies need informed consent that this one didn't, that's not true.

Now it turns out that the Facebook TOS didn't actually include the word "research" in it at the time. Let's be honest though, the only real weight of this discovery is that Facebook doesn't follow its own TOS, which isn't surprising.

And now (Tuesday, July 1) I am reading that there may have been Facebook users who were under the age of 18 in the study, in a followup at Forbes which links to a login-protected WSJ article. (I am guessing that under 18 is a different category for studies and there may be some legal issue about that, but I don't do A/B research on young people.)

Cornell's IRB: Oops
And it also looks like Cornell's IRB is trying to wash its hands of the IRB process: it looks like they just rubber stamped it because the experiment had already been run by the time it came to them. That is, the study was run without academic IRB approval. They actually have a statement about it.

Cornell's IRB statement is horrible and intentionally misleading. It says how the Cornell researchers':

...work was limited to initial discussions, analyzing the research results and working with colleagues from Facebook to prepare the peer-reviewed paper.

What this means is that they did everything except run a bunch of extremely complicated code on the Facebook system, which would have selected user accounts for the study, manipulated the study conditions, and then data scraped the relevant data out of a big data cloud computing environment. The only people qualified to do that are the Facebook techies.

There is no "limited" part here, they did everything, from start to finish, with a bit of help on the technical side. This is a very large and total failure of the IRB process.

Furthermore, Cornell faculty member professor Hancock "was not directly engaged in human research," which is laughable. Cynically I could say that we see here neither Facebook nor Cornell considers us human. My real guess is that Cornell's IRB just rubber stamped this and they have a very poor oversight process, or have a very weak understanding of Facebook.

The researchers had a theory that they could indeed manipulate people's behavior, as shown by what they post in Facebook, by manipulating what people saw in their feed. Some say this is irrelevant because Facebook manipulates our feeds all the time, and this is apparently in part why IRB approval was given. This is irrelevant. Facebook manipulates (this word is used slightly differently in research communities and the rest of the real world where it is very creepy, as it should be) our news feed, yes, but by "most popular", and never before has it been suggested that it is by mood. This is totally different and an important distinction.

Effect Or Not
Some people also say that it is irrelevant because there was no effect (despite the authors of the paper claiming a finding, despite the difference being roughly equivalent to zero). But no, there was no real effect that could be measured in Facebook. We have no idea what the real world effects were, if any. And that's important. Don't confuse big data with real world. Big is not complete, as someone once said about big data.

That the finding was so small but statistically significant makes it a bit paradoxical to talk about. So the researchers can claim a finding -- they wrote in the paper that "We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others" [italics added] but then Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO, said "Facebook cannot control emotions of users." So much for being on the same page.

The Cornell Press Release department heavily stresses the effects, repeatedly quoting one of the authors.

“Online messages influence our experience of emotions, which may affect a variety of offline behaviors,” Hancock said.

But of course they didn't take any offline measures at all.

Professor Jessica Vitak pointed out, in a Facebook thread, that it is most likely they didn't measure emotion at all (since we can't say that Facebook posts are that representative of emotion all the time). What they could have measured was something along the lines of social acceptability of the emotional leaning of posts (she summarized it much better than I did there and had a better phrase for it). We know they measured post language, but we don't really know what that represents beyond Facebook posts, if anything. That's not good science.

The Sample: Representative? No
The sample, its representativeness, and who the (non) results apply to are also problematic. Facebook users are not representative of the population at large. They just aren't. They have internet access and computer skills. Not everyone has those two things. We are not really sure about the sample from the study, it's Facebook users whose posts were in English but that is all we know about them. It is scientifically unsound to then claim that the (non) results here apply to everyone else because we don't know enough about who the unwilling participants were and how they match up with other groups of people.

Of course if you only care about Facebook advertising, then the only relevant sample is Facebook users.

The Sample: Mental Health? Users Between 13-18?
The public health angle has only been explored by a few comments I've seen, and it's complex. I've seen one comment say how about 10% of people have a mental health disorder: ah here's the National Institute of Mental Health, which says 9.5%.

9.5% of 689,003 = 65,455 people in the study with a mood disorder (most likely -- this is statistics).

Could seeing fewer positive or negative posts cause problems? Yes. Will it, for any one person? We don't know, there are many many factors at play here. But if you're running a study where the point is to manipulate mood and you're going to have 65,455 people with a mood disorder in it, you need to be really clear about that and really careful, and this study comes nowhere near that standard.

Others have pointed out that, besides having no way to filter out those with moods disorders in a study meant to manipulate moods, we have no idea if the study filtered out young people.

Additionally, some people have pointed out the public health issues around this kind of experimentation and manipulation: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein/status/483063444841574400/

A/B Testing Is Done All The Time! So What?
Some have also said that it's ok because companies do A/B tests all the time (that is, tests with two conditions). Well does that make every A/B test ok? No, it does not. Also, Facebook is not like other companies -- other companies are not the home of our digital communities. Facebook likes to say how big and important they are because of this, but if these communities are so important to people then it is not okay to manipulate the emotional content in them at all. Yes, communities can be informational, but a lot of the time Facebook friends are also real world friends and family and the emotional content is really, really important.

Communication Is Community
In-group, out-group is important. This is Facebook, people who for most of us are out-group, manipulating the messaging in our in-groups. Facebook degraded our communication, and communication is community (they have the same root in English), and when out-groups do that I think it is rightly seen as a threat.

I want to stress the community angle. Communication forms community. This experiment reduced important, emotional communication in communities for hundreds of thousands of people. Taking part in emotional communication is a vital ritual for community members that both reenforces that community and affirms that person's membership in that community. This includes both our taking part in emotional support (replying to something negative) and our taking part in celebratory communication. To reduce our capability to take part in important community ritual is a direct threat to our social survival, and it is anathema for a company that wants to be, and currently is, the largest online community platform in the world. (Two of my favorite thinkers about community and ritual are Clifford Geertz, and on this topic see his chapter about a funeral in Java; and James Carey, who has written about community, communication, and ritual.)

Some people have said that because the researchers didn't add any negative posts, merely took away positive ones (in one of the test conditions) but that you could still see them on your friend's page, that this is ok. No it's not. (Do you really go to each and every one of your friend's pages every time you go to Facebook? Do you know anyone who does? I didn't think so.) Taking away a negative post is horrible, because it takes away my ability to support a friend in need, that is, doing so undermines my ability to act appropriately in my community, and that is hugely problematic. The same is true for my missing out on a positive post: I am denied the opportunity to take part in a positive celebration in one of my communities.

What Was The Purpose?

Some have said that the researchers weren't trying to manipulate people's emotions, just their behavior on Facebook. Well no, that's ridiculous for at least two reasons. One is the title, which contains the phrase "emotional contagion", so we know what they were thinking. The other one is of course researchers always want to have something larger to say about human behavior. You can't manipulate what people are doing in terms of their emotions without perhaps affecting their emotions. If you don't know, you are obligated to find out. But again, we have no idea how, if at all, this affected people who were in the study in their real world lives.

Overall
As some have pointed out, this was research done on a not very interesting question (this seems pretty obvious to me), on people who did not give consent, with an ineffective IRB, under academic auspices but lacking academic standards, with no consideration of real world effects, with faulty methods, and which could have been done somewhat differently looking for correlations in what people saw and what they posted using data mining and no manipulations at all.

I am actually debating quitting Facebook because of this. Google+, anyone?

Conclusion
John Gruber, long time computer industry expert, has a post about it with one line I'll cite: "Yes, this is creepy as hell, and indicates a complete and utter lack of respect for their users’ privacy or the integrity of their feed content. Guess what: that’s Facebook." [Italics in original.]

But it was also Cornell and two Cornell-affiliated researchers.