Facebook Comes Under Fire For Secret Academic Research 'Inducing Emotional State' In Users, Most Shared Study In 2014.
Facebook Comes Under Fire For Secret Academic Research. Reports say that a vast number of college students hop on to Facebook to collect data on social activites like favorite movies, and accumulate' friends' and 'likes.' That's what makes Facebook the most popular social networking tool on the Net. But what about the consequences of using this informal data for scientific or academic research?
Facebook has a steady row of 58 million users and it is undoubtedly the sixth most widely used website in the U.S and this makes the social media site seem irresistible for collecting a variety of data for academic research.
According to a new study, Facebook's reportedly secret studies has brought the site more attention than any other academic project, the Guardian reports. An analytical scrutiny found that the 'emotional manipulation' experiment was the most searched academic project this year.
The controversial study titled, "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks", found its way into the US journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July 2014. Facebook sparked an outrage when it was revealed that Mark Zuckerberg's firm had presented various types of newsfeeds on users' 'Walls' to check for emotional state changes and using the 'happy' and 'sad' news to induce specific emotional states.
Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard and a member of the research team was quoted as saying in a New York Times report, "One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste," adding, "Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?"
The Guardian report continued to say, "Academic analysts Altmetric suggests that the research will have done wonders for the scientists' public engagement metrics after it ranked number one for attention out of every scientific article published in 2014."
