Facebook to be probed over mood experiment

Facebook is being investigated to assess whether an experiment in which it manipulated users’ news feeds to study the effect it had on moods might have broken data protection laws.

Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is said to be looking into the experiment carried out by the social network and two US universities in which almost 700,000 users had their news feeds secretly altered to study the impact of “emotional contagion”.

A spokesman from the ICO said it was too early to tell what part of the law Facebook might have infringed, the Financial Times reported.