As is my custom, in the preparation of this column I ran numerous searches and clicked on even more links, collecting relevant materials and rejecting others that while perhaps interesting weren't even relevant enough for a linked page in a Boidem column that frequently prides itself on seeing no link as too insignificant. Some items were already saved by me, earmarked for a discussion of this, or a similar, issue. While on one hand I clicked into a number of items that were new to me, on the other I also revisited numerous articles I’d read over the past year – both about the Facebook emotions experiment and additional issues. These included Zeynep Tufekci's piece in Medium and Tal Yarkoni’s blog posts. I have to admit that as I reviewed these particular items I found myself asking whether there was any reason to post this issue of the Boidem. Their posts covered pretty much all of the territory that I try to examine here. Yarkoni wrote:
Second, it’s not clear what the notion that Facebook users’ experience is being “manipulated” really even means, because the Facebook news feed is, and has always been, a completely contrived environment. I hope that people who are concerned about Facebook “manipulating” user experience in support of research realize that Facebook is constantly manipulating its users’ experience. In fact, by definition, every single change Facebook makes to the site alters the user experience, since there simply isn’t any experience to be had on Facebook that isn’t entirely constructed by Facebook.In his second post, a "defense" of his first, he noted that what he thought was common knowledge apparently wasn't - many people simply didn't know the extent to which the sites they frequent are constantly molding their experience there:
After watching the commentary over the past two days, I think it’s pretty clear I was wrong about this. A surprisingly large number of people clearly were genuinely unaware that Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other major players in every major industry (not just tech–also banks, groceries, department stores, you name it) are constantly running large-scale, controlled experiments on their users and customers.Tufekci, in her Medium piece, that in some aspects is a response to Yarkoni, doesn't deny that there's always manipulation (or perhaps "manipulation", since as Yarkoni notes this is often more inevitable than purposeful), but she views the "it's happening all the time" explanation as capitulation to a reality that we should be trying to change:
I’m struck by how this kind of power can be seen as no big deal. Large corporations exist to sell us things, and to impose their interests, and I don’t understand why we as the research/academic community should just think that’s totally fine, or resign to it as “the world we live in”. That is the key strength of independent academia: we can speak up in spite of corporate or government interests.She also makes it clear that rather than aid and abet this reality, the job of the academic community is to try and change it.