Author: Vindu Goel
Publisher: The New York Times
Publication Year: 2014
Summary: The following article focuses on issues prompted by controversial studies by Facebook. The first, in 2014, measured how users’ emotions were impacted by an adjustment to the kind of content appearing in their news feed. The second, from 2010, sent notifications to users reminding them to vote, and found that notifications that showed a list of the a user’s friends who had reported voting were correlated with a higher likelihood of the user going to the polls. The question raised by the author is one of consent: what types of experiments require consent or notification of subjects, as such studies are not regulated by federal law, nor must they pass an independent approval process. Dr. Mary L. Gray proposes a litmus test of whether or not researchers would be comfortable asking for consent from those being studied, stating that if not, there are likely to be “deeper ethical issue[s] to be considered.”