humble3d Posted June 23, 2016 Share Posted June 23, 2016 Who Watches the Data Mongers ? WHO remembers this ? The recent revelation that Facebook ran creepy "emotional contagion" tests shouldn't be a surprise I devoted my column in U.S. News Weekly this week to the controversy surrounding Facebook’s “emotional contagion” test – the company’s experimenting whether it could manipulate its users emotions by tweaking their news feeds to be either more happy or less so. But there was one other aspect of the public’s outraged reaction to the news of the manipulation that is worth noting, and that’s the underlying assumption many in the public seem to have about such companies as being inherently benevolent or at least neutral and agenda-less. I was reminded of an observation Robert Epstein of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology made in these pages when writing about an experiment he had conducted using search engine manipulation to alter the recent Indian elections. He wrote: Search rankings have this powerful effect on votes for the same reason that they have one on consumer behavior: the higher the ranking, the more people believe and trust the content, mistakenly assuming that some impartial and omniscient genie has carefully evaluated each Web page and put the best ones first. (Not so.) What's old is new again... We have short memories... And so it goes... More via the link below... http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2014/07/04/neither-google-nor-facebook-is-benevolent Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Batu69 Posted June 24, 2016 Share Posted June 24, 2016 Old news date July 4, 2014. Thread closed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.