Even the Editor of Facebook’s Mood Study Thought It Was Creepy

Mood researchers have been toying with human emotion since long before the Internet age, but it’s hard to think of a comparable experiment offline. It might be different, Fiske suggests, if a person were to find a dime in a public phone booth, then later learn that a researcher had left the money there to see what might happen to it.

“But if you find money on the street and it makes you feel cheerful, the idea that someone placed it there, it’s not as personal,” she said. “I think part of what’s disturbing for some people about this particular research is you think of your News Feed as something personal. I had not seen before, personally, something in which the researchers had the cooperation of Facebook to manipulate people… Who knows what other research they’re doing.”

Fiske still isn’t sure whether the research, which she calls “inventive and useful,” crossed a line. “I don’t think the originality of the research should be lost,” she said. “So, I think it’s an open ethical question. It’s ethically okay from the regulations perspective, but ethics are kind of social decisions. There’s not an absolute answer. And so the level of outrage that appears to be happening suggests that maybe it shouldn’t have been done…I’m still thinking about it and I’m a little creeped out, too.”