moment bottom of the hour. you are watching cnn. and you thought those ever-changing news feed layouts and the questionable privacy settings were the worst of facebook s crimes. uh-uh. now we re learning about a pretty creepy experiment. let me say, let s say you re in a good mood, pop open facebook, cruise your news feed and your mood darkens. you could have been one of facebook s guinea pigs. as it turns out, facebook has been allowing researchers, the company, to manipulate users news feeds to hide either the good news, like newborn baby pictures or bad news like animal cruelty videos, just to see whether it affected the emotions of the users themselves. chief editor joins me and lori siegelstein and tech correspondent. lori, before we get frustrated,
what to we know about the experiment itself? well, first of all, brooke, the premise was pretty interesting. the idea that there s this whole theory that you look on facebook and see everyone putting their best foot forward, living these amazing lives and you get depressed. so facebook data scientists said let s do an experiment and see if this is actually the case. well, they found that if you surface negative content in users news feed they would post negatively. which is interesting. and you take this step back and say, wait a second, we know they collect data an us, but they manipulated our emotions and that s where we call into the question ethics. record scratch on that. absolutely. why didn t, lance do we know why didn t facebook i presume this would ruin the experiment. but why didn t they at least say, heads up, we re about to manipulate your emotions for research? well, one, they don t have to. you know, you sign the terms of service agreement and it says they
second degree under georgia law, and that s felony murder. life and perhaps worse than that in the state of georgia. joey jackson, nick valencia, thank you so much. pleasure, brooke. bizarre and tragic all the way around. just ahead, outrage erupts after facebook conducts a secret experiment that played on our emotions. have you heard about this? what is facebook doing and saying about this without your knowledge? we ll discuss, coming up next. you re watching cnn. stay here.
research. and two, it might have freaked everyone out. they used about over 600,000 randomly selected facebook users and then obviously surfaced or manipulated their news feed. i think, you know, people s news feeds always seem so erratic and changeable anyway. i m not sure people would have noticed. but right now it s not part of facebook s policy to ask first. they tend to do and then ask later. because we click and say yes, and whatever, because we just want to hop on facebook and nobody actually pays attention or perhaps not enough of us pay attention to the fine print when logging on. what is facebook, lori, what are they now saying? i know it was pretty quiet, the story initially and only started to percolate a week later. sure. you know, i reached out for comment. let me read what they said. they said, we do research to improve our services to make the content people see on facebook as relevant and engaging as possible. a big part of this is understanding how people respond
documented children are streaming into the united states. stand by for that. plus, facebook under fire for conducting the secret experiment on its users. potentially using them as guinea pigs and it involves your emotions, it involves your moods. find out what the social network it without telling you. don t miss red lobster s new! lobster toppers event. four entrées, starting at just $15.99. like our new lobster-topped wood-grilled shrimp. or the new! lobster-topped lobster. and now for lunch, try our new lobster tacos, just $9.99.ends soon so hurry in. to build something smarter. some come here to build something stronger. others come to build something faster.