The Laboratorium : The Facebook Emotional Manipulation Study: Sources

This post rolls up all of the major primary sources for the Facebook emotional manipulation study, along with selected news and commentary.

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Paper:

• “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks” as PDF and as HTML (received Oct. 23, 2013, approved March 25, 2014, publication date June 17, 2014)

Authors:

• Adam Kramer (Facebook)
• Jamie Guillory (UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, previously Cornell)
• Jeffrey Hancock (Cornell Communications and Information Science)

Cornell:

• June 10 Press release announcing study, with correction re: funding source
• June 30 Statement
• Human subjects policy
• IRB approval flowchart
• Press comments by Susan Fiske (Princeton, PNAS editor for study): “pre-exisiting dataset”, “PNAS should not second-guess the relevant IRB”

UCSF:

• Human subjects policy

Facebook:

• Data Use Policy (last revised November 15, 2013)
• June 29 statement by Adam Kramer (confirmed to be Facebook’s statement on the matter)

PNAS:

• Editorial policies including (ii) author credits and (vii) human subjects policies

Common Rule:

• Full text
• OHRP guidance (October 16, 2008)

Previous Facebook studies:

• Effect of rainfall on emotional content
• Voter turnout (Nature, 2012)
• Social structure of networks (Physica A, 2011) (see also Michael Zimmer’s discussion)

Journalism:

• Kashmir Hill, Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users’ Emotions For Science (Forbes)
• Kashmir Hill, Facebook Doesn’t Understand The Fuss About Its Emotion Manipulation Study (Forbes)
• Adrienne LaFrance, Even the Editor of Facebook’s Mood Study Thought It Was Creepy (The Atlantic)
• Robinson Meyer, Everything We Know About Facebook’s Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment (The Atlantic)

Commentary:

• Jenny Davis, Facebook Has Always Manipulated Your Emotions (The Society Pages, June 30, 2014)
• Sebastian Deterding, Frame Clashes, or: Why the Facebook Emotion Experiment Stirs Such Emotion (Tumbling Conduct, June 29, 2014)
• Ed Felten, Facebook’s Emotional Manipulation Study: When Ethical Worlds Collide (Freedom to Tinker, June 30, 2014)
• David Gorski, Did Facebook and PNAS violate human research protections in an unethical experiment? (Science-Based Medicine, June 30, 2014)
• John M. Grohol, Emotional Contagion on Facebook? More Like Bad Research Methods (Psych Central)
• James Grimmelmann, As Flies to Wanton Boys (The Laboratorium, June 28, 2014)
• Michelle Meyer, How an IRB Could Have Legitimately Approved the Facebook Experiment—and Why that May Be a Good Thing (The Faculty Lounge, June 29, 2014)
• Christian Sandvig, Corrupt Personalization (Multicast, June 26, 2014)
• Daniel Solove, Facebook’s Psych Experiment: Consent, Privacy, and Manipulation (LinkedIn, June 30 2014)
• Tal Yarkoni, In Defense of Facebook (Citation Needed, June 28, 2014)
• Zeynep, Tufekci, Facebook and Engineering the Public (Medium, June 29, 2014)