Should that be legal? Could Mark Zuckerberg swing an election by promoting Upworthy [a website aggregating viral content] posts two weeks beforehand? It was claimed that Facebook may have breached ethical and legal guidelines by not informing its users they were being manipulated in the experiment, which was carried out in The study said altering the news feeds was "consistent with Facebook's data use policy, to which all users agree prior to creating an account on Facebook, constituting informed consent for this research".
But Susan Fiske, the Princeton academic who edited the study, said she was concerned. James Grimmelmann, professor of law at Maryland University, said Facebook had failed to gain "informed consent" as defined by the US federal policy for the protection of human subjects, which demands explanation of the purposes of the research and the expected duration of the subject's participation, a description of any reasonably foreseeable risks and a statement that participation is voluntary.
It is not new for internet firms to use algorithms to select content to show to users and Jacob Silverman, author of Terms of Service: Social Media, Surveillance, and the Price of Constant Connection, told Wire magazine on Sunday the internet was already "a vast collection of market research studies; we're the subjects".
The research was conducted on , Facebook users over a period of one week in According to the report on the study : "The experiment manipulated the extent to which people were exposed to emotional expressions in their News Feed". The study found that users who had fewer negative stories in their news feed were less likely to write a negative post, and vice versa.
Adam Kramer of Facebook, who co-authored the report on the research, said : "We felt that it was important to investigate the common worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people feeling negative or left out". However, he admitted that the firm did not "clearly state our motivations in the paper". Facebook fights US court over data.
Although some commentators assume that university research is only subject to the federal regulations when that research is funded by the government, this, too, is incorrect. Any college or university that accepts any research funds from any Common Rule agency must sign a Federalwide Assurance FWA , a boilerplate contract between the institution and OHRP in which the institution identifies the duly-formed and registered IRB that will review the funded research.
The FWA invites institutions to voluntarily commit to extend the requirement of IRB review from funded projects to all human subject research in which the institution is engaged, regardless of the source of funding. If you are a student or a faculty member at an institution that has checked the box, then any HSR you conduct must be approved by an IRB. As I recently had occasion to discover , Cornell has indeed checked the box see 5 here. OHRP, however, has issued non-binding, of course guidance on the matter.
They would not seem to have been involved, then, in obtaining either data or informed consent. Because the two academic authors merely designed the research and wrote the paper, they would not seem to have been involved, then, in obtaining either data or informed consent.
A previous report that the Cornell researcher had received funding from the Army Research Office, which as part of the Department of Defense, a Common Rule agency, would have triggered IRB review, has been retracted. A source familiar with the matter says the study was approved only through an internal review process at Facebook, not through a university Institutional Review Board.
Most recently, Fiske told the Atlantic that Cornell's IRB did indeed review the study, and approved it as having involved a "pre-existing dataset. As I suggested above, however, it does strike me as correct to conclude that, given the academic researchers' particular contributions to the study, neither UCSF nor Cornell was engaged in research, and hence that IRB review was not required at all. It strikes me as disingenuous to claim that the dataset preexisted the academic researchers' involvement.
But if an IRB had reviewed it, could it have approved it, consistent with a plausible interpretation of the Common Rule? The answer, I think, is Yes, although under the federal regulations, the study ought to have required a bit more informed consent than was present here about which more below.
Ideally, Facebook would have a consent process for willing study participants: a box to check somewhere saying you're okay with being subjected to the occasional random psychological experiment that Facebook's data team cooks up in the name of science. As opposed to the commonplace psychological manipulation cooked up by advertisers trying to sell you stuff. This is a BETA experience.
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