Fury at ‘creepy’ network study

Facebook users have reacted with fury to a "creepy" experiment carried out by the social network and two American universities to manipulate their emotions.

The US technology giant secretly altered the news feeds of almost 700,000 users to study the impact of “emotional contagion” in January 2012. The aim of the government-sponsored study, was to see whether positive or negative words in messages would lead to positive or negative content in status updates.

Its authors wrote: “When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks.”

Many users reacted with fury following online reports of the findings, which were published in the June 17 edition of the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A Facebook spokesperson said: “We do research to improve our services and to make the content people see on Facebook as relevant and engaging as possible... There is no unnecessary collection of people’s data in connection with these research initiatives and all data is stored securely.”