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Was The Department Of Defense Behind Facebook’s Controversial Manipulation Study?
Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
I’ve spent pretty much all day reading as much as possible about the extremely controversial Facebook “emotional contagion” study in which the company intentionally altered its news feed algorithm to see if it could manipulate its users’ emotions. In case you weren’t aware, Facebook is always altering your news feed under the assumption that there’s no way they could fill your feed with all of your “friends’” pointless, self-absorbed, dull updates (there’s just too much garbage).
As such, Facebook filters your news feed all the time, something which advertisers must find particularly convenient. In any event, the particular alteration under question occurred during one week in January 2012, and the company filled some people’s feeds with positive posts, while others were fed more negative posts.
Once the data was compiled, academics from the University of California, San Francisco and Cornell University were brought in to analyze the results. Their findings were then published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They found that:
For people who had positive content reduced in their News Feed, a larger percentage of words in people’s status updates were negative and a smaller percentage were positive. When negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results suggest that the 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.
You probably know most of this already, but here is where it starts to get really strange. Initially, the press release from Cornell highlighting the study said at the bottom: “The study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office.” Once people started asking questions about this, Cornell claimed it had made a mistake, and that there was no outside funding. Jay Rosen, Journalism Professor at NYU, seems to find this highly questionable. He wrote on his Facebook page that:
Strange little turn in the story of the Facebook “emotional contagion” study. Last month’s press release from Cornell highlighting the study had said at the bottom: “The study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office.”
Why would the military be interested? I wanted to know. So I asked Adam D.I. Kramer, the Facebook researcher, that question on his Facebook page, where he has posted what he called a public explanation. (He didn’t reply to my or anyone else’s questions.) See:https://www.facebook.com/akramer/posts/10152987150867796
Now it turns out Cornell was wrong! Or it says it was wrong. The press release now reads: “Correction: An earlier version of this story reported that the study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office. In fact, the study received no external funding.”
Why do I call this strange? Any time my work has been featured in an NYU press release, the PR officers involved show me drafts and coordinate closely with me, for the simple reason that they don’t want to mischaracterize scholarly work. So now we have to believe that Cornell’s Professor of Communication and Information Science, Jeffrey Hancock, wasn’t shown or didn’t read the press release in which he is quoted about the study’s results (weird) or he did read it but somehow failed to notice that it said his study was funded by the Army when it actually wasn’t (weirder).
I think I would notice if my university was falsely telling the world that my research was partially funded by the Pentagon… but, hey, maybe there’s an innocent and boring explanation that I am overlooking.
It gets even more interesting from here. The Professor of Communication and Information Science, Jeffrey Hancock, who Mr. Rosen mentions above, has a history of working with the U.S. military, specifically the Minerva Institute. In case you forgot what this is, the Guardian reported on it earlier this year. It explained:
A US Department of Defense (DoD) research program is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar program is designed to develop immediate and long-term “warfighter-relevant insights” for senior officials and decision makers in “the defense policy community,” and to inform policy implemented by “combatant commands.”
Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD ‘Minerva Research Initiative’ partners with universities “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.”
SCG News has written one of the best articles I have seen yet on the links between the Facebook study and the Department of Defense. It notes:
In the official credits for the study conducted by Facebook you’ll find Jeffrey T. Hancock from Cornell University. If you go to the Minerva initiative website you’ll find that Jeffery Hancock received funding from the Department of Defense for a study called “Cornell: Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes”. If you go to the project site for that study you’ll find a visualization program that models the spread of beliefs and disease.
Cornell University is currently being funded for another DoD study right now called “Cornell: Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social Contagions” (you’ll find the description for this project on the Minerva Initiative’s funding page).
So I went ahead and looked at the study mentioned above, and sure enough I found this:
There he is, Jeff Hancock, the same guy who analyzed the Facebook data for Cornell, which initially claimed funding from the Pentagon and then denied it.
I call bullshit. Stinking bullshit.
So it seems that Facebook and the U.S. military are likely working together to study civil unrest and work on ways to manipulate the masses into apathy or misguided feelings of contentment in the face of continued banker and oligarch theft. This is extremely disturbing, but this whole affair is highly troubling in spite of this.
For one thing, although governments and universities need to take certain precautions when conducting such “research,” private companies like Facebook apparently do not. Rather, all they have to do is get people to click “I accept” to a terms of service agreement they never read, which allows companies to do almost anything they want to you, your data and your emotions. What we basically need to do as a society is completely update our laws. For starters, if a private corporation is going to lets say totally violate your most basic civil liberties as defined under the Bill of Rights, a simple terms of service agreement should not be sufficient. For more invasive violations of such rights, perhaps a one page simple-to-read document explaining clearly which of your basic civil liberties you are giving away should be mandatory.
For example, had Facebook not partnered at the university level to analyze this data, we wouldn’t even know this happened at all. So what sort of invasive, mind-fucking behavior do you think all these large corporations with access to your personal data are up to. Every. Single. Day.
The Faculty Lounge blog put it perfectly when it stated:
Academic researchers’ status as academics already makes it more burdensome for them to engage in exactly the same kinds of studies that corporations like Facebook can engage in at will. If, on top of that, IRBs didn’t recognize our society’s shifting expectations of privacy (and manipulation) and incorporate those evolving expectations into their minimal risk analysis, that would make academic research still harder, and would only serve to help ensure that those who are most likely to study the effects of a manipulative practice and share those results with the rest of us have reduced incentives to do so. Would we have ever known the extent to which Facebook manipulates its News Feed algorithms had Facebook not collaborated with academics incentivized to publish their findings?
We can certainly have a conversation about the appropriateness of Facebook-like manipulations, data mining, and other 21st-century practices. But so long as we allow private entities freely to engage in these practices, we ought not unduly restrain academics trying to determine their effects. Recall those fear appeals I mentioned above. As one social psychology doctoral candidate noted on Twitter, IRBs make it impossible to study the effects of appeals that carry the same intensity of fear as real-world appeals to which people are exposed routinely, and on a mass scale, with unknown consequences. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. What corporations can do at will to serve their bottom line, and non-profits can do to serve their cause, we shouldn’t make (even) harder—or impossible—for those seeking to produce generalizable knowledge to do.
If you read Liberty Blitzkrieg, you know I strongly dislike Facebook as a company. However, this is much bigger than just one experiment by Facebook with what appears to be military ties. What this is really about is the frightening reality that these sorts of things are happening every single day, and we have no idea it’s happening. We need to draw the lines as far as to what extent we as a society wish to be data-mined and experimented on by corporations with access to all of our private data. Until we do this, we will continue to be violated and manipulated at will.
For some of my Facebook critical articles from earlier this year, read:
The Chief Operating Officer of Facebook Wants to Ban the Word “Bossy”
How UK Prime Minister David Cameron Paid Thousands of Dollars for Facebook “Likes”
How Facebook Exploits Underage Girls in its Quest for Ad Revenue
This Man’s $600,000 Facebook Disaster is a Warning For All Small Businesses
»
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GW was on the SMISC case three years back.
http://georgewashington2.blogspot.com.es/2011/07/pentagon-seeks-to-manip...
Just makes me laugh that the likes of Fuckerberg and co come on all innocent post-Snowden.
When money talks idealogy walks.
So the Pentagon doesn't like Mises or Rothbard then. LOL!
A big part of me says the hundreds of millions of self-absorbed drones using Facebook could do worse than get manipulated by the government.
My thesis is that it's too late to mitigate or avoid America's decline. It's inevitable at this point. Projects like this one simply hasten the process.
Rome must burn down before it can be rebuilt.
Well that explains it....
Everytime I go to my face book account I want to cause somebody discomfort. The whole time I thought I had mental problems. As it turn out I was just being maniplulated by my government.
I remember when you had to have a valid .edu email account to get in. I left before they let just anybody sign up.
Facebook is a huge, user-enabled analog computer for running sociology experiments. It is perhaps the most egregious example of this sort of thing, but it is hardly unique. Most large corporations function the same way these days. That's also what your grocery loyalty cards are for, for example. Companies now have the impression that their employees' and customers' personal lives are theirs to toy with as they please. The theory is that the data thus collected can be used by consulting firms to optimize business operations or sold to advertisers who will target customers for special offers.
While the theory is Orwellian enough, the pitiful reality is that none of this shit even works as intended. There is only so much "optimization" you can demand from a workforce and still keep the process within human limits; and we've all seen the articles highlighting the diminishing returns of online advertising. In the end, all this data mining and pattern recognition has been nothing more than a make-work project for inept middle managers and consultants to justify their existence by proposing to solve some problem or streamline some process. This is where all those people who went off and got college degrees in business or communications, but who didn't really have the intelligence to benefit from higher education, end up. The theory is bereft of philosophy or of any real understanding about how human beings tick. It is pointless information-juggling for minor and superfluous mandarins, and it has a deleterious effect whenever it is applied to a real-world situation.
The good thing about this story is that it may prompt ever more people to abandon Facebook for good. Honestly, in five years Facebook will probably not even exist.
Spot on Goose. I'd love to see it die. I wish they had a family version so I could just stay in touch with everyone sans adverts and random political musings. I think it will stay, however, cuz it's statist sponsored.
Um, you can email baby pictures to Granny.
The NSA gets those baby pictures either way, so might as well stick with Fuckbook for the convenience factor.
+1 good sir. What the advertisers are too slow to realize is that, even if these market experiments were 100% replicable, the consumers they are targeting are burdened with nondischargable student loans, 30 year adjustable rate McMansion mortgages, 84 month car loans at 8% interest for the his and hers Escalades, $200 per month data plans for each of the family's gubmint tracker phones, etc. You can't get blood from a rock, and most of the dumb fuckers these advertisers are targeting have savings that consist of the change that fell out of their pockets and got mired in the couch cushions. Internet advertising is basically some corporation with cash to burn saying, "Fuck it, we just redid the executive washrooms and the landscaping is peachy, let's just buy some fucking internet ads."
"What the advertisers are too slow to realize is that, even if these market experiments were 100% replicable, the consumers they are targeting are burdened with nondischargable student loans, 30 year adjustable rate McMansion mortgages, 84 month car loans"
Well CaptainObvious, maybe its not about ad revenue? Television for example is not set up to maximize ad revenue. CONTROL is more valuable.
Its about controlling the propaganda water cannon so you can properly hose the sheeples. Not about ad revenue.
Facebook manipulates the news feed and decides what it believes is relevant to you. Even if you select to show feeds based on time of posting, Facebook still manipulates the posts. Posts from months ago will show up before new posts. If you don't post every day you have no chance of having your posts show up in the default "top stories". So people that only casually use Facebook never have their posts followed by people that may want to see them.
Facebook now sends messages from "friends" asking you to fill out personal information for Facebook to use. The Facebook system hates users who don't give any information like phone numbers and employers.
I only post life events that my family and close friends might want to see. Pictures of birthdays, etc. With the current policies it doesn't mattwr because my posts won't be part of the news feed.
Because of this people are reducing the time they spend on the site and leaving Facebook in droves. Fuckerberg and Co know this which is why the company is resorting to CIA style behavioral modification to keep the selfie narcissists glued to it.
Knock knock. Who's there?
Face. Face who?
Face the fact that the older you get the less interested you are in hanging your ass out on Facebook.
Obomber having a bad stretch... tweak FB and get people smiling :)
To be shocked by the information included in Michael Krieger's post means only one thing: you havent been paying attention.
What I find more interesting is this- according to Krieger, "Any time my work has been featured in an NYU press release, the PR officers involved show me drafts and coordinate closely with me, for the simple reason that they don’t want to mischaracterize scholarly work."
Generally (and professionally) speaking, this is not how news is supposed to be managed before it's presented to the public. When did this behavior become standard operating procedure? Or is it only popular among the liberal vomit masters at places like NYU? It's the kind of thing you'd expect to see at a High School newspaper.
Our "news" is at the level of a High School Paper....it's probably worse.
Here's your news right here: https://gma.yahoo.com/hot-mug-shot-felon-signs-agent-modeling-contracts-...
DUDE WITH MUGSHOT AFTER ARREST IS HOT TO SOCIALLY INEPT GIRLS AND SECURES MODELING AGENT EVEN THOUGH HE HAS A CRAPPY JAILHOUSE TAT ON HIS NECK.
We are fucked.
That tear tat used to be code for having killed a cop.
If that's the case, then his biggest crime is not enough tear tats.
boycott faceplant
Which means you probably still have an account there
this is nothing compared to the psychomed epidemic. these drugs are so potent they continue to pollute even after being through waste treatment plants, and some say are even in our rain water (Gen Ripper) in countries where these meds are either unavailable or not widely accepted, that is another matter. as for the good old usa, take away all the psychomeds, and the stock market would crash instantly. and bernanke thinks he is such a smart sob.
All too true and worse than we can imagine....
http://aadivaahan.wordpress.com/2014/04/15/the-pharmacopic-scam-lies-exp...
Anyone learned in the importance of social media in marketing knows that it wields power. The undertaking here is to find ways to influence sheeple in every effective way possible. Tv watching is on the decline, as are the usual cheap tricks from programming. The networks can only blast the public so much with pro-homosexual plot-lines, racial provocation, the glorification of unattainable excess and other distractions purposed to keep our country divided while dumbing them down.
Zuckerberg no doubt provided them valuable info pertaining to which headlines and which keywords got the most play, and cross-tracked the unwitting participants comments/reactions, observed responses across a persons social network noting reaction times, degree of response etc; all to develop a methodology to tnterpret and influence us on this relatively new platform.
This should put to rest any notion about zuckerberg's attitude about his treasure trove of info. He will fucking sell you out. Yet, idiots of the world still participate.
Vicky Knoodleman-Kagan is a big fan of social networking. I wonder what kind of mental manipulation those Maidan foot skldiers went thru to make them want to join up with the IMF gang.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Well said.
Oh...
"...the glorification of unattainable excess and other distractions purposed to keep our country divided while dumbing them down."
Perhaps you meant "unsustainable excess"
edit: (perhaps this comment was for intric8. made a boo boo)
If he devises ways to influence the doofus american populace wholesale while reporting data behind the scenes to uncle stupid, this zuckerberg bastard is as (if not more) dangerous to our country than all of the networks combined.
I read this article, but I was already pissed off.
Ya Think?
So are you telling me our president is not a usurping gay Kenyan choom-smoking Muslim bastard Cloward-Piven neo-fascist mom-jeans wearing golfer after all? People have just been yanking my lariat? Ha-ha, very funny.
Facebook, manipulating your reality....what a surprise.
Okay, I am going to describe an experience I had yesterday, that was very, very weird. I went to Walmart - I go there every three months for certain things that are hard to get elsewhere, and a few things that are far cheaper there. It is always a disgusting experience that puts me in a bad mood. But not this time. Many years ago, I took Valium one time; never since. I still remember vividly how relaxed, cheerful and blissed out it made me feel. Yesterday's shopping expedition to Walmart made me feel that way!!!! During the shopping, and for hours afterward!!!! There is still a residue of it.
So you heard it here first. June 30, 2014, Mountain View, CA Walmart. One of those "experiments." Lighting? Pheromones? Something, anyway. Yes, I feel like a total freak recounting this, but it happened.
Were you in a public restaurant before going to walmart? Seems like someone slipped a little mdma in your iced tea
Haha. No, I almost never eat out, and hadn't that day.
They like to try stuff out on the Bay Area. Back in the 60's they brought in a submarine that released influenza over the East Bay. Test of dispersal techniques on unsuspecting public. People died. Now a days, the Bay Area is a morgellons hot spot. Frightenning stuff. Field tests of transhuman nano technology. Some people have goulish reactions. What's even more frightenning is that most people don't ... have a discernable reaction.
what were those missing Chinese engineers, missing on that plane. What were they working on??
BUAP [thanks for that Satoshi] for your mind. The pieces arrive ... say with the rain. You absorb them ... thru your skin, by drinking and eating. DNA is a programming language. Create TnA. Like the standard, but different enough to avoid chaotic collisions between the host and evolving command and control system. DNA self organizes. Pirons self organize out of the same building blocks as DNA, as does this/ these? new man made derivative, when
enough mater.ial is present it will self organize into structures which will then become processes. Nano processes to tweak some gland or neuron and then, and then ... I guess that's all she wrote. Its The Invasion of the Body Snatchers come to life, except you don't need all that nasty mess associated with the pod. They just take the existing model of you and rewire it.
I've been saying for awhile, the only reason companies like Facebook are in business right now is by being a government mouth piece. The government is their biggest, and probably their only customer. There are alot more paper tigers like them out there. Completely worthless, extortion outfits. Part of the great deception of our time.
Interesting. Was thinking same about Amazon recently. The company makes no money and in the process has put many small businesses out of business. So no real apparent profit motive getting the sheeple cheap products. Helps to keep inflation in check. Idk huge valuation... Who is bidding up the price? Government? Amazon and Facebook, you think about how many people they touch on a daily basis and how the government would want or demand access or are Bezos and Zuck on the government payroll happily taking the money?
You are barking up the wrong tree. Like the guy discussing ad revenue from media. Making money is not the point in these cases. Control of percrptions. Protecting the scam. The skim is so huge, and the consequences of failure so great that much can be spent on protection.
So Amazon makes no profit?? What's the point?? The point is getting a near as possible monopoly on distribution, to control what gets distributed.
We are talking about books here. That's ideas. Potentially very dangerous for the PTB. Much better to drive those mom & pop book stores out of business by crushing all margins because who knows, maybe they could publish or promote authors that expose the scam and end the skim.
End the Fed so the .gov can not pour pinted up fiat into propagandizing us freedom loving folks.
Next, we will learn that Zuckerberg himself is actually working for Mossad and they are actually behind this latest violation of common decency.
CIA NSA is Mossad.
See all captured NSA traffic gets passed, unfiltered to the Zstate. Unfiltered, as in congressional / SCOTUS pants dropping. All of it.
Owned.
"all captured NSA traffic gets passed, unfiltered to the Zstate"
Dat's a fact, jack.
This ain't no party, this ain't no disco.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DblvhECdws0&sns=em
google is .gov, facebook is a servent of .gov, banks own .gov, any other question you got as to why stocks go up? 1913 had consequences that make tyrants sleep well at night. some of us avoid this tech, smart phones ...
a new world where men are free can come from this, if we all just walk away from the illusions..amish had some good ideas - there is still hope, but we need 20% or so to see what is making earth a prison planet.
Can anyone who read this and who knows anything about "Zuckerbook" and the can of worms that facilitated after 9/11 with the Patriot Act(s) and NDAA be at all surprised? Our Universities and their key funding has been owned and operated by the DoD and the intelligence communities since the end of WWII.
Just ask this 30 year career officer of the NSA how much like the Country he use to study we've become only on "steroids"!
FYI...
Posted these two yesterday.
I'd be interested if Cornell has a grant to fund projects through MD's like this one...
I'd also be interested to know if their is a behavioral science experiment with "grant funding" to study the effects of enforced water shortages to lower income families who no longer can afford to pay for it without a job!
Perhaps these are part of the same research project?
Embrace what you can leverage from corporations like facebook, and discard what is useless.
Activism in the current paradigm has little return on investment of effort. The Three Ps: Planning, Protection and Preparation (H) are advised.
www.roacheforque.blogspot.com
You're absolutely right.
Use "Zuckerbook" to broadcast president Obama's intentions
here
http://www.intellihub.com/proof-obama-admin-flooding-illegals-american-cities-now-video/here http://investmentwatchblog.com/obama-takes-executive-action-on-immigration/
and muffle all the Federal employees at the CDC, immigration and border patrol who try to stop it.
http://whitehousewhispers.com/feds-threaten-medical-staff-with-arrest-take-cell-phones-immigrants-have-more-rights-than-workers/#more-108
http://patriotrising.com/2014/07/01/medical-staff-warned-keep-mouths-shut-illegal-immigrants-face-arrest/
And when you're successful in bringing in the herd without any resistance to stop it, contact Doctor Kawaoka!
Then give Mark and President Obama your "best wishes" with a middle digit greeting!!!
I tried to send a link from utubes All Wars are Banker Wars to FB and was rejected by an FB Moderator as dangerous. Yeah it was dangerous to FBs Jesuit Banker controllers.
As far as manipulating the public's mental state and apathy as you state "work on ways to manipulate the masses into apathy". Hell the US government has been chenically dumbing down and creating apathetic citizens since introducing fluoride into the drinking water in the 40s.
Few realize Hitler used fluoride in his concentartion camps to better "manage" the prisoners. Our Jesuit rulers are the poisoning masters of history in order to control the public through toxic injury. See Fluoride's Deadly Secret by neurosurgeon Dr Russell Blaylock to better understand how sheeple are made.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB3xcN_eoPo
I find it interesting how much Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog dislikes Facebook, yet he deploys those creepily ubiquitous "Like" and "Share" buttons from the beast itself. Surely, he knows that those buttons ARE spyware that allows Sauron's public pet to track your every cybermove. Haven't heard of that? See http://theweek.com/article/index/215546/is-facebooks-like-button-spying-... or just browse for "facebook like button spy" yourself.
So, what's the deal with that, Mike?
Good article, BTW.
Edit: Maybe some creative coder can come up with a parody social commentary button that might become similarly ubiquitous. It would have a similar look to the Facebook Like button, but would be a middle finger that would be called the Spike button. Clicking that Spike would randomly IM popular folks like Google CEOs, Bankers, Senators, heads of Health and Human Services, etc. with messages of appreciation for their work.
Vinton Cerf is the real FATHER OF THE INTERNET who developed ISP while employed (contracted by)
D. A. R. P. A
otherwise until that you couldn't communicate across various networks and different protocol computers
So enjoy your CERFING
Also the DOD wanted an alt route for comms in the event the wired and radio networks got hit...hence packets that travel multi paths.
LIKE!
FuckfaceBook is the government. Damn who hasn't figured that out yet. Everything is recorded and used at will for any g'ment agency on the "inside" for whatever use they want. If you're stupid enough to use that shit you deserve what you get. It's about being lazy posting the intimate details of your life while eating a pink slime burger on open wifi.
This is my take on the whole thing.
1. Government realizes sheeple are going to explode at some point.
2. Government is looking for ways to direct that explosion towards any group other than the government. see IRS releasing T party donor lists to FBI "accidentally"
Wonderful.
The govt. learns how to push the buttons of morons who post duckface selfies and gangbangers showing off new tattoos.
That's going to be as useful as a hat full of assholes.
Or...another way to interpret the results, is that when they show people more negative stuff on Facebook, users more see stuff that's negative, and decide to share it, along with a cynical comment, but don't actually change moods.
Yeah if you have. Facebook account you are just asking for it but posting revolutionary hate shit on zerohedge is the stealthy approach because yer usin' a secret handle...
Fail monkey bitchez.