[Air-L] #longread on Why the Facebook Experiment is Lousy Social Science

[Galen Panger]

Posted a piece up on Medium yesterday that I think could make for some good
weekend reading, if you're interested.


Why the Facebook Experiment is Lousy Social Science
<https://medium.com/@gpanger/why-the-facebook-experiment-is-lousy-social-science-8083cbef3aee>
*Facebook is grappling with its impact on our social and emotional lives —
and that’s a good thing. But it has to get the research right. Why Facebook
did the experiment, and how to make it better.*


A ton
<http://laboratorium.net/archive/2014/06/30/the_facebook_emotional_manipulation_study_source>
has been written about the Facebook experiment, but for me, there were
still a number of things left unsaid. Chief among these was why Facebook
did the experiment in the first place. A major motivation was to address
the widespread fear that Facebook makes us unhappy; the study specifically
mentions social comparison, making people feel "left out," and the "alone
together" theory.

So the study uses emotional contagion to fight back against these notions,
and claims to have shown that happy posts on Facebook really do make people
feel happier (as opposed to sad or depressed).

But as my piece says in great detail, the study's research design is quite
flawed on this—and is biased precisely where it counts most for what
Facebook is trying to prove. Though Facebook posts have a number of social
biases, Facebook uses posts as an unbiased representation of how we feel as
a result of emotions in News Feed. This is problematic. There's evidence,
for example, that posts have a bias toward high-arousal emotions
(excitement, anger) and a bias away from low-arousal emotions (sadness,
depression, calm). Meaning if people are feeling sad because of Facebook,
it's not going to show up in their Facebook posts.


Anyway, that is one big point in a number of points I make. I also make a
bunch of suggestions for how Facebook could improve the research design.
It's a long piece, so if you make it even part of the way through the
piece, I thank you.... and want to know what you think (good or bad).

cheers,
galen



-- 
galen at ischool.berkeley.edu