Facebook Unethical Use of User Data for Social Experimentation
Bonita V. Earls
Longwood University

Abstract
His paper explores the ethical impact of Facebooks 2012 study on emotional contagion in a social web environment. The study is controversial due to the fact Facebook researchers failed to follow standard ethical guidelines as set forth in the healthcare industry, failed to clearly communicate the study, its intentions, and methodology to its users, and manipulated data in such a way it invoked emotional and mood changes of its unaware users. The idea of algorithmic program use in the social media sphere comes into question as well.

Introduction
In January 2012, the news feeds of approximately 700,000 users of the popular social media site, Facebook, were manipulated in a manner so that some of its users only had positive news stories show up on their pages and others had only negative news stories show up. The experiment was conducted over the span of a week, from the 11th to the 18th, without the knowledge of the users (Kramer, 2014). According to the researchers, the goal was to see if “emotional contagion” occurs without direct interaction between people and in the absence of nonverbal cues. By manipulating the news stories, either all positive or all negative, they could study what effects, if any, there was on the moods of the users (LaChance, 2014). This is only one of many social experiments that the Facebook Core Data Science Team, has performed since 2008 when the team was established. All of which were performed without the knowledge of the website users (Dewey, 2014).
History
Performing social experiments and studying the psychology behind human behaviors is not new nor is the concept of studying human behavior itself unethical. What is unethical though, is experiments being performed on unaware, ill informed, and possibly