Facebook apologizes to users for psychological experiments

Facebook has triggered a violent protest when it revealed that the social network has conducted psychological experiments for nearly 700,000 users. In response to the situation, executive director Sheryl Sandberg had to apologize officially to appease the public.

Facebook's experiment turned 700,000 users into " white mice , " to see if their moods worsened if they read bad news and were happy to read many good news. And the results show that the answer is yes.

" This is part of the research that companies do to test different products, and it is only. It has been delivered to users badly ," Ms. Sandberg told small businesses. in a meeting in New Delhi. " And because communication is not good, we apologize. We never meant to offend you ."

Ms. Sheryl Sandberg at the meeting

It should be noted that Sandberg does not show any remorse about the study, nor does it mention that Facebook will improve communication, conveying to users in the future. Basically, this is not an apology, and Facebook only regretted that users were upset about the company's actions.

Moreover, one of the purposes of this study is designed to make people feel uncomfortable, or at least to see if Facebook can do it. According to Sandberg , Facebook often does this. The results of the experiment show that Facebook has a very good ability to shape people's moods through algorithms. This is a very frightening thought and it is not easy to be appeased by a half-hearted apology.