Flutterby™! : You are being manipulated

Facebook tinkered with users’ feeds for a massive psychology experiment. The paper is Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks.

We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues.

Nice Marmot asks what does this mean as Google owns not just our search results, but the fiber to our homes.

Yeah, the sky is falling, but: William Randolph Hearst did it before these guys.