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Facebook’s Emotional Contagion
For a while now it has been well proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by scientific research (Cornell and California Universities) that there is a phenomenon called ‘emotional contagion’, meaning that it is possible to induce a state of either happiness or sadness in someone, by inducing that feeling and emotion without their knowledge or awareness.
Up until now the experiments have only been carried out in laboratories. But, now that Facebook has come clean and admitted that users of the social network were induced into feeling either positive or negative emotions in a study that they carried out on a handful of them, we have the proof that it is possible to do so on a massive scale.
Is this the future? Inducing happy and sad emotions? Will we be starting wars half-way around the world by subliminal-like induced emotions of aggression? Or will we be inducing euphoric happiness as we wish in the world of business to create a buzz and get the consumers buying once again? Even worse, could it be political exploited?
Facebook already had every bit of information that it wanted to have about us as do other social-networking sites. They knew where I went to school, who my brother is and whether I’m married or single and if I like the Red Sox’s or I root for the Democrats. But, it can do a whole lot more than that. It wasn’t enough to just see me happy and sad…they wanted to see if they could make me feel one emotion or another by influencing me. Plus, it didn’t actually take a whole lot of work to be able to do it.
Now, it has published the results of the test carried out on 689,003 Facebook users and how it influenced their home pages and what they wrote on their walls. Newsfeeds were secretly filtered according to the flow of comments, video and photo posting and web links. One part of the test exposed users to ‘positively-charged emotions’ while the other cohort ended up with ‘negative emotional content’.
The results proved: “Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks”.
Facebook had the findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in the USA this month and a Facebook spokesperson state that the reason behind carrying out such a test was the following: “to improve our services and to make the content people see on Facebook as relevant and engaging as possible”. To improve their services? Surely it has greater power than that? Surely it could be used to influence you in a political decision? Surely it could influence you into thinking that this product is great or that product is bad?
• 689,003 people participated in the study (unknown to them, of course).
• That means about 0.04% of all users in the world.
• 1 in 2,500 people.
• It took place over a period of a week in 2012.
• Emotions were reinforced by what they read and saw.
• Emotional content was filtered and the reactions of the users were monitored by researchers.
What’s worrying about the study that Facebook carried out is not so much that it was done covertly and that the people were the rats in the cages at their merciless analysis, but the fact that our emotions can be influenced by what we see , hear and read around us. It’s the fact that our state of mind can be induced and manipulated by exactly what someone decides to show us. That is the scary thing since we are no longer in control of not only what we get shown and what we look at, but now it’s the loss of emotional control that has set in thanks to damn social networking. Just how intrusive is that?
Facebook has once again over-stepped the mark of ethical behavior. It has gone over the red line of what is legal and what is not. Any human being involved in a test must by legal rights know that they test is being carried out in order to participate it in freely. Where did the notion of ‘informed consent’ in the law vanish to? What happened to the forms that should have been filled in providing consent?
We’re not guinea pigs Facebook!
It’s high time that all of this were stopped! Who wants to start?
Originally posted: Facebook’s Emotional Contagion
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Did the study "correct" for all the fake accounts with phoney user names and info all linked to anonymous email accounts with fake aliases (like mine)?
I stopped using Facebook some time ago, and I've been immeasurably happier since.
Now if you could only wipe out those footprints.
"Any human being involved in a test must by legal rights know that they test is being carried out in order to participate it in freely. Where did the notion of ‘informed consent’ in the law vanish to? What happened to the forms that should have been filled in providing consent?
We’re not guinea pigs Facebook!"
dear mr pivot "yo momma!" farm:
all of life is an experiment.
this post i am putting on this blog is an attempt to experiment on you. do i need to inform you of this fact or obtain your consent? no, of course not, i'm engaging in free speech, on a private website.
get over it.
Revrex: I'm sure you scabbies,mumps,measles,chlamydia infested grandchildren will thank you for helping Zuckerterd destroy America one diseased ilegal alien criminal at a time....
Get a grip. Get back on your meds.
It's free advertising for custom paint work you clueless sod.
Nothing more.
Zis is ze social netvork, you vill smile, you vill frown, you vill laugh, you vill click, you vill buy.
Christ, does no one have a liberal arts education anymore? A requisite course is Sociology 101. Seriously, this is where you learn about crowd manipulation, how and why beauracracies are formed and sustained, peer pressures, mob mentality, etc. Psychology 101 is also a requisite course. Here we learn about conducting experiments and strict protocol - ethics - of experimentation. We learn how polling is done and how and why polling is generally skewed for bias. The liberal arts background seems to be waning; I've heard professors angst at the general lack of curiosity in students these days. No wonder Amerikans cannot spell, do not know grammar, particularly punctuation. Amerikans don't read anymore. If you see me on an airplane, I will be the one who's reading an actual paper book sitting next to you. Oh, and I wouldn't open a Facefuck account if you held a gun to my head. I've always known what their agenda is.
Only idiots still have FB accounts. Why anyone would want to help a Multi billionaire greedy Socialist Jew destroy America with ilegal immigration is beyond me.
George Orwell could never in his wildest fantasies have imagined the power that the Silicon Oligarchs now possess.
If only they were able to do something useful with it other than flooding the economies of Luxembourg and Switzerland with machine-washed dollars.
Add in the NSA takings and you have some sort of Rosetta Stone, dipicting the human experience in real time. I'm shore they're discovering all kinds of interesting tib-bits about what they're primarily interested in ... control and manipulation.
For example, it is easier for the shadow government to navigate in this day and age, when they're getting real time metrics, derived from peoples private thoughts, conversations, reactions. Reactions to some outrageous PTB plot, like The BeanTown bombing might inform them to back off and dial it down for a while, or tell them where more mental manipulation is required.
they should study facebook fatigue instead
I guess they were going for 'fear' on my page. They were flooding my feed with stories about some guy who just taught Glenn Beck to "kill with his bare hands".
The idea that Glenn Beck is wandering the countryside, able to kill with his bare hands, has kept me indoors for weeks.
Anyone ever consider that ZH might be an emotional contagion experiment? By constantly posting downbeat, disaster-is-just-around-the-corner articles and then monitoring the comments for signs of depression?
Naw, couldn't be!
"Anyone ever consider that ZH might be an emotional contagion experiment?"
I'd go further than that. Zero Hedge is one of the most effective propaganda outlets on the net, but (I would argue) not in the way its creators intended.
Think of the articles posted as the programs on TV, and the comment section as the ads.
You skip over (channel surf) the stuff that doesn't interest you, and focus your comments on the articles that do, correct? In that sense, you are getting your view across to an audience with the same initial preference as yourself. At the same time, you are (hopefully) adjusting your view as new information and perspectives are presented. The articles themselves, while interesting to some degree, couldn't survive without the free-for-all nature (fight club doctrine) of the comments. Take that away and this site would wither on the vine.
So, which is more important, the content, or the form?
New roommate watching commercial TV - I haven't watched it in years but couldn't resist dropping in on it. What incredibly vile stuff! I can't stand all the manic happiness and coolness and and all the overpaid "beautiful people" rhapsodizing and spazzing over stupid irrelevant nonsense, or joyously participating in contrived pseudo-sporting events in what look like circuses.
Mass starvation and slaughter in Slaviansk (sp?) not even mentioned, while these nitwits spend hours of clucking and moralizing over the poor slob being charged with murder cause his kid died in a hot car, and raking over his poor slob of a wife. Baseball game itself was cool but then the sportscasters get into the same sickening super-cool schtick.
Are they supposed to make us happy? Make us depressed and suicidal because we aren't that happy and aren't that rich and cool? Make us believe the world is full of rich ditzy body builders without a care in the world - and the stupid people who watch them? That we must be wrong in the head to be living out here where people are losing their dreams and homes and families and sleeping in their cars?
I don't like the Facebook model, don't trust Zuckerberg, not sure I really believe he actually runs it, but still, I'll take Facebook over commercial TV, be it Network or Cable, anytime.
?.. but still, I'll take Facebook over commercial TV, be it Network or Cable, anytime.
Why choose?? Take neither and you and our world will be better off.
BTW, I like the FB hamster. Appropriate.
<duplicate>
ZH is a collection tool for the day when they need to cleanse the population of trouble-makers or wanna-be trouble-makers...
It's not good to think that way. ZH is one of many forums on which people are waking up, each in their own way, and multiplying the headaches the Security State will have when they try to act. And you can bet there are intelligence analysts, police, military investigators, spooks and what not reading ZH on the sly on their own account or as assigned but still taking it in.
Truth can be a dangerous thing.
SolZHenitsyn - Alexander has the ZH residing in his name.
Civics doesn't work if you don't do your civic duty.
Everyone who speaks out makes it harder for a crack down to occur.
Solzhenitsyn has some great quote re. talk in the Gulag about if they'd only ganged up, as a group when the Laddas came to their residential blocks, instead of cowering each behind his door, hoping he'd be safe.
Meh, FB is good for my business. I log on 5 - 10 minutes a month to throw pics up there of my work and direct people to my web site. For me it's FREE somewhat targeted advertising. I never chat on there or even respond to what people write unless they go to my web site and specifically email me. I'm SURE I'm not using FB as zuckerman or what ever his name is intended, but then I don't care. It's free and funnels work to me.
I'm sure you scabbies,mumps,measles,chlamydia infested grandchildren will thank you for helping Zuckerterd destroy America one diseased ilegal alien criminal at a time....
Ok, let's not get all negative about this ;-) For one thing, this is just standard behavioral research, conducted in a social graph setting.
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full
What can we learn from what they disclosed about the experiment, and what can we infer about what they were thinking about when they set it up, and what they actually learned?
A few things:
They messed with the "News Feed", an ephemeral event stream, instead of the persistent items. This underscores a risk with ephemeral, streamed content that isn't present (yet) with static content.
They chose a sample size of almost 700K (random) users. This is significantly larger than necessary for their results to be statistically valid, and we can infer that this number is related to the degrees of connectedness of the social graph. They don't talk at all about the implications of their research on the graph, and yet this was clearly one of the key parameters, so what aren't they telling us?
Similarly, there is no mention of the offline effects of their manipulation; I suspect that they had enough data to measure this (i.e., the resulting emotional contagion on non-FB users, or at least transmitted through non-FB channels)
How many dumb ass FB users beat up their spouse, had a bad day at wotk, drove off the road because they were made bummed-out by FBs manipulations? One of the MKUltra victims jumped out of a multi-story window durring the mind manipulation experiment they neglected to tell him he was part of.
About [covertly] manipulating the news feeds ... that's pretty funny. Like that is not exactly what every MSM entity [covert or otherwise] is doing?!?
yup, great points. My first reaction to hearing this story was that they used a MASSIVE number of test subjects. If it was a simple marketing effectiveness test, it would have been targeted, and much smaller. This story came out to set up a bigger story.
Someone must be ready to out the real story. I can't wait for the spin on this.
Considering Facebook, Yahoo, Google and all the rest of the MSM on the web is owned by the Jesuit Cabal that also owns the Fed and has been manipulating the masses through toxic injury since 1913, it's not surprising that our Jesuit rulers would carry out further manipulative experiments,
These are the master poisoners and manipulators of history. Their favorite trick is to give just enough poison to cause a slow agonizing death as they did to Pope Clement in 1773 for banning them from the church for their evil plots. These organized crime parasites stole the church's gold and hooked back on 43 years later. They plotted the Fed in 1913 and has been poisoning and creating sheeple ever since through the poisoning of our food, water, air and medicine with toxic chemicals and metals. View Vatican Assassins by Eric Phelps on Utube for the full suppressed story.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqCdxMyh6eM
Nice change up.
The bright side is if they kill you, you get your last sacraments and off to Heaven you go.
A much better deal than the Satanists offer.
Jesuits? Really? How exactly does that correlate to the first central fiat banking system (London) started by a really nice Jewish family in Frankfurt?
Because I actually believe what they were doing was researching "emotional contagion". This was either some clown who can't figure out that showing people pictures of dead cats makes them sad and pictures of boobs makes them horny, or they were doing something else entirely.
Quinvarius, this social molding thru media is subtle and effective. Look no further than the neutered, brain dead American public if you need proof.
Cats with machine guns are a bit offputting.
What if they really don't like that stinky stuff in cans?
One rarely meets a pussy of that caliber.
I, for one, LOVE those ISIS-ISIL instagrams of kittens sleeping on automatic weapons. Moar.
#FUKU
http://enenews.com/study-plutonium-being-discharged-fukushima-pacific-oc...
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/iwakamiyasumi5
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Social Networking sites are like feedlots. Two things happen at a feedlot: The sick get weeded out and the rest get fattened up...
Make of this what you will.
Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other so-called social websites are more about social engineering than social networking. It involves influencing individual behavior, including how others will think and behave towards you. Imagine how scores and labels assigned to your personality and behavior by these companies will eventually be institutionalized and attached to you like your credit score is now. Imagine these measures becoming major factors in your ability to buy a home, rent an apartment, get job, buy health insurance, run for public office. Imagine you, becoming nothing but a collection of those measures, and it becoming all that Facebook, their corporate and government clients, or anyone important believes is important about you. This is where they’re headed folks. Their goal is to steer everyone into their supposedly benign, free, and easy social networking system while they operate behind the curtain with unregulated authority to shape the system to their liking and control the behavior and identity of those who use it (and of course sell it out to any buyer who will pay). But, unlike credit scores you can only imagine it, because, you are never allowed to see it, or challenge it’s validity, or the methods they use to define it inside the Central Planning Cloud.
If you’re subjecting yourself to this inevitable outcome, you better hope they get “it” right.
DownTools - great post except for the last sentence. The PTB is trying to achieve something for it's own purposes. Getting fully shackled by these bastards is like getting a window seat on the slave galley.
I would say to young Americans Go Dark. Not in the sense of your consciousness, but what the MIC uses the term for ... disappear.
Unfortunately, if you do not have a face- account, you can be ostracized and declared as "old school" by your friends and employer.
Try finding a job if you are not on Face- or Twiter.
You can do like my child and keep a page just for employers and other people who expect you to have a Facebook presence. You can post pictures of very old vacations or just random stuff every year or so, many people have idle accounts.