Apparently facebook was trying to either depress you or improve your mood. I never knew! Here is a clinical post by Jess Zimmerman.
It's cute that Facebook was apparently trying to make me sad by suppressing my friends' good-news updates so that I feel surrounded by anxiety and illness, in order to measure the effects of "contagion" on users' emotional states. Well, "cute" in the manner of a creepy social experiment on uninformed participants, so maybe not really the standard usage of "cute". Remember Dexter's Laboratory, the cartoon where the little kid was always plotting world-destroying antics but was also two feet tall and six years old? Cute like that.
Anyway, the point is: bless their invasive little hearts, but this was doomed from the start. People don't get sad because their Facebook friends are sad. We get sad because our Facebook "friends" are happy.
This is not me being cynical – of course I'm capable of empathy for the people I care about, and vice versa. No, this is a matter of Facebook not understanding its own product. For the average Facebook user, only a fraction of our "friends" are actually people we love – people whose setbacks strike us near to the heart, people whose triumphs uplift us along with them. The rest are former co-workers, friends of friends from that party that one time, people who were jerks to us in high school but not big enough jerks to reject their friend requests, and exes. Screwthose guys.
I realize that scientific progress sometimes means performing rigorous research on questions that seem self-evident. (I also realize that thisresearch is supposed to be done on people who know they're participating in a research investigation; never mind that right now.) But you don't need a study, informed or not, to tell you that the connection between our emotions and those of people around us are a lot more complicated than "sad=sad". All you need to do is look at a happy Facebook pic from your ex's wedding.
The study in question, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, reports that, for a week in January 2012, some Facebook users saw an altered timeline wherein posts with either "negative" or "positive" words got suppressed. A lot of the hand-wringing horror over this unauthorized experiment stems from the reality that users who were exposed to more negative content responded by making more negative posts, which implies that they were more sad. In other words, they were materially harmed by their experience as social-science abductees.
But the study doesn't seem to control for the possibility that people simply match their tone and word choice to that of their peers, to avoid being the tall poppy. In the end, it's not clear that Facebook found out anything about emotional contagion. It sounds more like semantic contagion to me.
If Facebook really wanted to make people experience unhappiness, suppressing "positive words" isn't going to do the trick. Emotions are way more complicated than the mere words we use, and it's not always posts with negative words that make us sad.
For its next mad-scientist foray into emotional manipulation, Facebook and Co should instead try building a news feed where users see only the following:
I doubt there would be a "negative word" among them, but I guarantee you the emotional contagion would be off the charts.
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