Meta (Facebook) - Thought & Emotion Manipulation

[YellowDragon]

I am going to guess most if not all members here heard about this. Where Facebook was running experiments on people without them knowing. Using their algorithm to push certain content into people's feeds to see how they would feel and act. Some were given non-stop sad/depressing/enraging news and stories while the others were given happy/uplifting/empowering news and stories. I believe they used targeted feeds dealing with social issues like sexism and racism as well. No one had a clue it was happening either. This should be considered illegal but as of now, they seem to have gotten away with it.

Do you think this is something everyone should be more aware of moving forward and laws should be put in place to "free the code" so to speak on social platform giants like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, etc. so we know we are not being manipulated - and if we are, we can opt in or out of their tests? 

[Cosmic]

Most of my family still uses Facebook on a daily basis. Even after hearing about this and them selling off private data, allowing the government to ban free speech under claims it was Russian disinformation, and allowing the FBI into private messages... They still all use the platform. Most people just don't care enough. 

[britanica]

23 hours ago, Cosmic said:

Most of my family still uses Facebook on a daily basis. Even after hearing about this and them selling off private data, allowing the government to ban free speech under claims it was Russian disinformation, and allowing the FBI into private messages... They still all use the platform. Most people just don't care enough. 

Same with my family. I can't tell you how many times I told my own mother to stop using the platform. She has fallen for scams on there a number of times. She is only on there to basically see what her social circle is doing. She just judges everyone and gets all in a bad mood. It seems pointless. Then my sister goes out of her way to post and share things on Facebook without even telling the family and then gets mad when no one knows what is going on in her life. 

[YellowDragon]

It just bothers me how easily people just forget about their rights and freedoms online. 

Just imagine if this was happening offline. I have to imagine a lot more people would be upset but we did see it happen in the US and didn't know it was happening until they were outed by Edward Snowden. Even then, only a fraction of people actually cared. 

[Cosmic]

On 10/3/2022 at 11:08 AM, britanica said:

Same with my family. I can't tell you how many times I told my own mother to stop using the platform. She has fallen for scams on there a number of times. She is only on there to basically see what her social circle is doing. She just judges everyone and gets all in a bad mood. It seems pointless. Then my sister goes out of her way to post and share things on Facebook without even telling the family and then gets mad when no one knows what is going on in her life. 

I think we all know someone like that. They would rather post about it online than have a real conversation with their own family. One of my nieces is like this. The family won't see her for months and then she gets mad when she doesn't get invited to things. When she does get invited, she complains about how broke and tired she is but is always showing off her latest tattoo on Facebook. I swear she has spent over 5k on them at this point. Not to mention she has no desire to find a real career for herself because her mindset is "no job will ever be good enough for me!". She fits in so well with social media addicts.