Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2014; it reports on the Facebook emotional contagion study published in PNAS that month, and the events described were current then. The controversy grew in the following weeks, and PNAS later added an editorial expression of concern to the paper.
Facebook has carried out a social experiment on how emotions are transmitted between users of the social network. To do so, it manipulated the feeds of approximately 689,000 accounts, choosing what kind of posts they should receive, and then drew some conclusions.
The conclusion, published in the PNAS journal, is that our mood can indeed change markedly depending on the kind of news we receive.
The experiment consisted of blocking positive posts for a percentage of users, so that they received only negative messages, while for the rest they did exactly the opposite: they blocked negative messages and filled their feeds with positive posts only.
They found that users who received negative posts set off a contagious wave of negative posts, while people who received more positive posts and were kept away from negative comments responded with more positive messages.
The experiment set out to test how far the emotions expressed by other Facebook users can influence our own emotions. The result is clear contagion on a massive scale within the huge social network.
This shows that it is not only in real life that we can affect other people’s mood and make them more positive or negative; on social networks too, as human beings, we should choose people who, even if they will not brighten our day, at least will not bring us down.
When this news was first published in the Daily Mail, there were already users outraged that Facebook had used its users for a social experiment without their knowledge or consent.
Of course, the experiment did not measure the mood, and the irritation, you get when you follow a page and Facebook decides, through its algorithm, not to send you any of its posts, positive or negative.
Featured image: Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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