In January 2012, Adam Kramer, a scientist in charge of Facebook's data science field, conducted an experiment with 689,003 users. After intentionally providing good news and bad news to Facebook users for a week, he conducted an experiment to observe whether emotional contagion occurs between users (i.e., how much posts accompanied by emotional expressions increase). was performed. Hypothetically, users who received bad news for a week increased their emotional depression and, as a result, posted more negative information, and users who received good news for a week increased their happy emotions It was an experiment I expected to post more content. Facebook users were unaware that they were being tested.

The experimental results were published two years later, in 2014. Regarding this experiment, a columnist named Kashmir Hill of the Forbes media published an article on whether experimentation without the user's consent is really ethical. In particular, as with the contents of the experiment, it raised the issue that the Facebook experiment was an experiment that was not notified to users and obtained consent. Facebook argued that there was no problem because users agreed to the provision when they signed up for Facebook with a provision called the “Data Use Policy”. (However, in reality, Facebook additionally included the phrase “…agree to the study” in the data usage policy clause about 4 months after the experiment started).

* Reference

Kashmir Hill. (2014). Facebook Manipulated 689,003 Users' Emotions For Science. Forbes, June, 28.

1. Is Facebook's response to the incident ethical?

2. Judge whether a company is ethical in terms of 1 Moral Good Ethical Theory, 2 Utilitarian Ethical Theory, and 3 Kant Ethical Theory.