Facebook and the Ethics of Research

In class we've begun exploring the world of ethics and its relation to the world of professional occupations. In light of the topic, we read the New York Times article describing a psychological experiment conducted by Facebook. In this study, Facebook manipulated the visible content of hundreds of thousands of users, changing their news feed to reflect more positive or negative content. The goal of this study was apparently to see how emotions can spread through social media and how this affects social media usage. The controversy over the study was that Facebook did not request any addition consent, using their far-reaching user agreement as a legal blanket to justify their actions.

I believe that the actions of Facebook were ethically questionable, siding on the wrong side of the sliding scale. While Facebook does make it fairly clear that you've given away most if not all of your rights when agreeing to the user agreement, I think that conducting manipulative experiments on people without their knowledge and explicit consent is wrong. I base this view off of the school of thought which justifies actions by their virtue. In our society, honesty is regarded as virtuous and honest, transparent, reviewed research procedures are the ethical norm. If such a study was done in a university in the same manner, it would be thrown out the window along with a few key staff members. What Facebook did was, by societies standard of virtue, dishonest and against virtue. If Facebook ever hopes to command respect with their research, they ought to follow the guidelines set out by whichever research body lies in the country of study: The American Psychological Association in this instance. While I may imply that Facebook should be "following the rules" as per the deontologicalists, I in fact only mean to say they should be following these rules due to their basis in virtue and ethical norms.

Fun fact, data collection is the most efficient it's ever been. Here's an article on how Target's marketing research actually tipped a family off on a pregnancy. Time to whip out that "real" paper journal: Big Brother is watching.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#432e6d834c62


Goel, V. (2014, June 29).  Facebook Tinkers with Users' Emotions in News Feed Experiment Stirring Outcry. New York Times. Retrieved from  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html?_r=0