Facebook Emotionally Manipulated Your Timeline, Feels Kinda Bad About It

For one week in January 2012, you may or may not have seen a happier or sadder Facebook timeline, a fact that possibly might have altered your mood for the week. If you did, you were an unwitting part of a Facebook experiment that sought to test whether emotions were contagious on a mass scale without personal interaction.

The result: a little bit, yup. Users who saw more positive posts were more likely to post positive updates themselves, and vice versa.

But the results of the study are less flammable than the fact that Facebook emotionally manipulated its users without their consent. (Sort of — that data use policy you agreed to upon signing up allows the company much leeway.) FB clearly didn’t anticipate the negative reaction, as evidenced by the fact that it published the findings of the study.

Facebook apologized for the study Sunday. “Having written and designed this experiment myself, I can tell you that our goal was never to upset anyone,” lead researcher Adam Kramer wrote, before tipping Facebook’s hand: “We were concerned that exposure to friends’ negativity might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook.”

[h/t Forbes / Bloomberg]

[Image via JaysonPhotography / Shutterstock.com]

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