Good news, fellow Facebook users. You were not a pawn in a huge, ominous experiment about emotions and civil unrest funded by the Department of Defense and played out on Facebook, according to the social media titan. Instead, you were just a pawn in Facebook’s own study on manipulating your emotions. How do you feel about that, you know, emotionally? Just for my own records. Facebook’s now-famous 2012 study on the effects of negative and positive posts to a user’s News Feed was recently discovered to have some connections to a Pentagon program studying “emotional contagion” and civil unrest.
Facebook and Cornell researchers have denied that the controversial “emotion contagion” experiment was funded by the US Department of Defence (DoD). The social network told the Guardian that the study was entirely self-funded and that Facebook is categorically not a willing participant in the DoD’s Minerva Research Initiative, which funds research into the modelling of dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. “While Prof Hancock, like many researchers, has conducted work funded by the federal government during his career, at no time did Professor Hancock or his postdoctoral associate Jamie Guillory request or receive outside funding to support their work on this PNAS paper,” John Carberry, director of media relations at Cornell University where the academic work took place, told the Guardian. “Initial wording in an article and press releases generated by Cornell University that indicated outside funding sources was an unfortunate error missed during the editorial review process.”