For those of you that watch or read the news, you may have heard about Facebook’s latest endeavor. For one week they conducted an experiment on some of its users; according to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it was 689,003 users to be exact. They wanted to see how their users responded to negative posts versus positive posts. Researchers wanted to know how it affected their mood and how it would affect what the users would then post under themselves.
Facebook Study
If the user saw only positive posts, would the user more likely post positive updates and if they only saw negative posts, would they only post negative posts? This is what Facebook was trying to research. Facebook did this by controlling what you see. The controlling of “what you see” has been something they have been doing for a little while now. They say it is so you see only what you want to see; hence not giving you the real Facebook experience, in my opinion. They only allowed positive posts or negative posts into your feed and then monitored your response. The collected data was then collaborated with Cornell University and the University of California.
The results showed that we are influenced by others emotions, even if it’s through social media. In-person interactions are not the only way to feel empathy or emotions towards another person. You can feel sad just by seeing a few sad posts as you scroll through Facebook or any other social media platform.
As you can see by the number of users that were affected, it was not everyone. This only equates to .04% of its users; barely a drop in the massive Facebook bucket. Many Facebook users were upset about these findings. Facebook defended itself by siting the data use policy that all must agree to when signing up to use Facebook. Facebook does tend to update their privacy policy and other policies regularly, and users should take note of these updates.
I understand why users might be upset, as most folks do not wanted to be experimented on without their knowledge. But the fact is, I believe this occurs more often than you may think, no matter what platform you use. Think about why we have the locations of roads and interstates. All because of unknown research. That’s one positive way to view this. As for business owners, it provides insight on how we should be relaying our messages when on Facebook. It is important to know that people can and will portray how we are feeling based on a Facebook status we post. Let Captevrix help you by posting on social media what needs to be seen and not just things that we think our followers want to see. It is our job to show the real life of your business!
As we all know, Facebook continues to make changes both on the personal and business side. What are your thoughts? Would you be more receptive if Facebook provided a privacy type setting to “opt-out” of these research studies?
