ABSTRACT
In March 2014, Facebook released a study entitled “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks.” The paper explains how social media can readily transfer emotional states from person to person through Facebook's News Feed platform. Facebook conducted an experiment on members to see how people would respond to changes in a percentage of both positive and negative posts. The value proposition of the Facebook Newsfeed Experiment was to determine whether emotional manipulation would be possible through the use of social networks. This clearly could be of great value to one of Facebook's target audiences – its advertisers. According to Dr. Sandra Collins, a social psychologist and University of Notre Dame professor of management, it is clearly unethical to conduct psychological experiments without the informed consent of the test subjects.
