I'm even more concerned about the friends of those participating in the experiment, particularly those that were part of the group filtering out more negative messages.
If a friend made a post deemed negative, that would otherwise signaled to close friends to check up on that person and intervene if necessary, there's a very good chance these messages would have been filtered out in a system like this.
The potential affected population becomes much greater than the 155,000 being experimented upon then, and would have put a much greater number of people at risk of not having any close friends or others available to intervene, who would have otherwise been able to do so if the facebook algorithm hadn't been altered to follow this bullshit happiness metric for research purposes.
I really hope this becomes much bigger news, and some action is taken to ensure something like this doesn't happen again; but considering the lack of funding and attention given to mental health, especially in the work-till-you-drop business world, i sadly doubt it.
If a friend made a post deemed negative, that would otherwise signaled to close friends to check up on that person and intervene if necessary, there's a very good chance these messages would have been filtered out in a system like this.
The potential affected population becomes much greater than the 155,000 being experimented upon then, and would have put a much greater number of people at risk of not having any close friends or others available to intervene, who would have otherwise been able to do so if the facebook algorithm hadn't been altered to follow this bullshit happiness metric for research purposes.
I really hope this becomes much bigger news, and some action is taken to ensure something like this doesn't happen again; but considering the lack of funding and attention given to mental health, especially in the work-till-you-drop business world, i sadly doubt it.