Facebook admitted that it manipulated users emotions in a “disturbing” experiment. It modified more than 689,000 of its users accounts by prioritizing “positive emotional content” from news feeds, links, photos, and comments of friends to see if it could make them happier.
They discovered that when positive emotional content from friends was reduced, users would post more negative content themselves essentially becoming less happy. When negative emotional content was reduced, users posted more positive content. This is called emotional contagion.
The study was published recently by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. It concluded: ‘Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks.”’
‘This is extraordinarily powerful stuff,” said British Labour MP Jim Sheridan, a member of the Commons media select committee, “and if there is not already legislation on this, then there should be to protect people.”
There is considerable cause for worry that social media will be used to manipulate people’s minds and thoughts in politics and other areas of life. Could the CIA, for instance, manipulate data to foment discontent in a given part of the world? Could governments project political views on citizens by controlling the content? Could businesses maximize this capability to influence buying decisions?
Facebook didn’t tell its users it was attempting to manipulate their emotions, which has caused a considerable reaction. But the experiment supports a couple of important conclusions. The things people see and read can manipulate their minds and hearts. What is to stop businesses, governments and others from attempting to use social media to powerfully affect the views and actions of their users?
“The mind of a man or a woman does not come down in a moment from purity and holiness to depravity, corruption, and crime. It takes time to transform the human to the divine, or to degrade those formed in the image of God to the brutal or the satanic. By beholding we become changed.” Amazing Grace, page 224
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