ABSTRACT
Facebook, Inc. sought to expand on the findings and hoped to demonstrate that emotional contagion can occur just as easily through networked social media as it can through dyadic, interpersonal exchanges. Facebook conducted an experiment on members to see how people would respond to changes in a percentage of both positive and negative posts. Facebook’s other major market is advertisers who buy information about Facebook’s users. In January of 2012, from the 11th through the 18th, Facebook conducted a study on emotional contagion by manipulating the extent that a group of Facebook users were exposed to emotional expression in their News Feed. In March of 2014, Facebook released a study entitled “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks.” While some of the researchers have since expressed some regret about the experiment, Facebook as a company was unapologetic about the experiment.
