Did Facebook's experiment violate ethics?; CNN, 7/2/14

Robert Klitzman, CNN; Did Facebook's experiment violate ethics? :

"Editor's note: Robert Klitzman is a professor of psychiatry and director of the Masters of Bioethics Program at Columbia University. He is author of the forthcoming book, "The Ethics Police?: The Struggle to Make Human Research Safe." The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author...

In 1974, following revelations of ethical violations in the Tuskegee Syphilis study, Congress passed the National Research Act. At Tuskegee, researchers followed African-American men with syphilis for decades and did not tell the subjects when penicillin became available as an effective treatment. The researchers feared that the subjects, if informed, would take the drug and be cured, ending the experiment.

Public outcry led to federal regulations governing research on humans, requiring informed consent. These rules pertain, by law, to all studies conducted using federal funds, but have been extended by essentially all universities and pharmaceutical and biotech companies in this country to cover all research on humans, becoming the universally-accepted standard.

According to these regulations, all research must respect the rights of individual research subjects, and scientific investigators must therefore explain to participants the purposes of the study, describe the procedures (and which of these are experimental) and "any reasonably foreseeable risks or discomforts."

Facebook followed none of these mandates. The company has argued that the study was permissible because the website's data use policy states, "we may use the information we receive about you...for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement," and that "we may make friend suggestions, pick stories for your News Feed or suggest people to tag in photos."

But while the company is not legally required to follow this law, two of the study's three authors are affiliated with universities -- Cornell and the University of California at San Francisco -- that publicly uphold this standard."

Facebook’s experiment is just the latest to manipulate you in the name of research; Pew Research Center, 7/2/14

Rich Morin, Pew Research Center; Facebook’s experiment is just the latest to manipulate you in the name of research:

"But is what Facebook did ethical? There is a good amount of discussion about whether Facebook was transparent enough with its users about this kind of experimentation. They did not directly inform those in the study that they were going to be used as human lab rats. In academic research, that’s called not obtaining “informed consent” and is almost always a huge no-no. (Facebook claims that everyone who joins Facebook agrees as part of its user agreement to be included in such studies.)

The question is now about how, sitting on troves of new social media and other digital data to mine for the same kind of behavioral analysis, the new rules will need to be written.

Experimental research is rife with examples of how study participants have been manipulated, tricked or outright lied to in the name of social science. And while many of these practices have been curbed or banned in academe, they continue to be used in commercial and other types of research."