"Ethical" Manipulation

I was an early user of Facebook thanks to the prodding of my Grad students and I soon became an early ex-user. It had zero value as far as I was concerned and moreover had negative value relating to the postings of people who I somehow had befriended. These friends were bemoaning their personal and/or love lives and frankly that was not at my level of interest. So Farewell Facebook.

Now the manipulation of Facebook participants without their knowledge has caused a bit of a flurry. If this were say a clinical trial in medicine then I would be very concerned. It would clearly violate a bunch of standards. But alas it is beyond my kin of expertise in the wild world of Social Sciences.

Yet some person from a New York Hospital alleges that we are all wrong in our assessments, in fact she is right and we appear to be just ignorant naysayers. In Nature she states:

Let us be clear. If critics think that the manipulation of emotional content in this research is sufficiently concerning to merit regulation or charges of unethical behaviour, then the same concern must apply to Facebook’s standard practice — and many similar practices by companies, non-profit organizations and governments. But if it is ethically permissible for Facebook to offer a service that carries unknown emotional risks, and to alter that service to improve user experience, then it should be allowed — and encouraged — to try to quantify those risks and publish the results. Much has been made of the issue of informed consent, which the researchers did not obtain. Here, there is some disagreement even among the six of us. Some think that the procedures were consistent with users’ reasonable expectations of Facebook and that no explicit consent was required. Others argue that the research imposed little or no incremental risk and that informed consent might have biased the results; in those circumstances, ethical guidelines, such as the US regulations for research involving humans, permits researchers to forgo or at least substantially alter the elements of informed consent. Although approval by an institutional review board was not legally required for this study, it would have been better for everyone involved had the researchers sought ethics review and debriefed participants afterwards. The Facebook experiment was controversial, but it was not an egregious breach of either ethics or law. Rigorous science helps to generate information that we need to understand our world, how it affects us and how our activities affect others. Permitting Facebook and other companies to mine our data and study our behaviour for personal profit, but penalizing it for making its data available for others to see and to learn from makes no one better off.

Now the tone, "Let us be clear" is a bit off putting.  She is not lecturing to some collection of inmates at Sing Sing, this is in Nature. As to the Review Board, perhaps someone should have given a thought. Is this mind-manipulating? I see no reason why it is not. Yes, "much has been made of informed consent" . They disagree amongst each other. If so then there should have been some addressing the issue, any disagreement indicates a concern.

In my opinion this write-up is near callous and appears to reflect in my opinion a level of arrogance that one should be seriously concerned with. Should on-line sites who have very manipulable audiences try out the manipulation. They apparently do so with Ads but with the News we may be seeing for example what may be going on in Russia as we speak. Is that a good idea? Hardly.