• 11 years ago
• Posted in:Comments
• 1
• Author: jasonchow

Most people see Facebook as a social network, some people see it as a marketing opportunity; however, only a small percentage of Facebook’s users realize that they are opting to contribute to what may be the biggest source of social data. Recently in January 2012, a study on whether or not positive and negative affiliations affected what user’s posted in their status updates was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy Sciences. A huge ethical controversy arose, as Facebook users were infuriated at how Facebook was able to manipulate user’s emotions and gather data and research without informed consent—and get away with it legally.

Preston Wong agrees with these user’s angry feelings as he states in his blog: “Success is not judged simply by money and power, but also human decency and social contribution.” He concludes, “It is unfair to the millions of Facebook users to have their emotions toyed and played with without their consent.”

I think that although Facebook cares about money and power, their research is actually very interesting, as there aren’t many large-scale methods of gathering data (Facebook being used worldwide by about 1.23 billion users). Through this data that isn’t tarnished by unbiasedness, as many users are oblivious to the fact that they are test subjects participating in a huge social experiment, I could argue that Facebook is extremely successful in terms of social contribution, as their powerful research helps develop their site to be more user-friendly to their Facebook users—even to those who are complaining about how Facebook is being immoral and unethical. After all, it is ultimately the consumer’s decision as to whether or not they want to be written onto the data pages of Facebook. In my opinion, I think that the many features, benefits, and opportunities that Facebook has to offer its users is a reasonable tradeoff for the free data given without consent.