Facebook Added 'Research' To User Agreement 4 Months After Emotion ...

Facebook made this change in May 2012, four months after it ran its emotion manipulation study.

Unless you've spent the last couple of days in a Faraday pouch under a rock, you've heard about Facebook's controversial emotional manipulation study. Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer ran an experiment on 689,003 Facebook users two and a half years ago to find out whether emotions were contagious on the social network. It came to light recently when he and his co-researchers from Cornell University and University of California-SF published their study describing how users' moods changed when Facebook curated the content of their News Feeds to highlight the good, happy stuff vs. the negative, depressing stuff. The idea of Facebook manipulating users' emotions for science - without telling them or explicitly asking them first - rubbed many the wrong way. Critics and defenders alike pointed out that Facebook had permission from the Data Use Policy which among its thousands of words informs people that their information might be used for 'internal operations,' including 'research.' However, we were all relying on what Facebook's data policy says now. In January 2012, the policy did not say anything about users potentially being guinea pigs, nor that 'research' is something that might happen on the platform.

Four months after this study happened, in May 2012, Facebook changed its data use policy, and that's when it introduced this line about how it might use your information: 'For internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.' Facebook helpfully posted a 'red-line' version of the new policy, contrasting it with the prior version from September 2011 - which did not mention anything about user information being used in 'research.' Here is the relevant part:

Some critics don't think that throwing the word 'research' into a many-thousands-word-long data use policy is adequate for performing psychological experiments on users, but now it seems that Facebook hadn't even done that.

I've reached out to Facebook for comment and will be updating this post.

The data use policy change from May 2012 is available in full below.

Facebook Data Policy 2011 v 2012