It’s always fascinating to watch what happens when a blog posting goes a bit viral. This is what it looked like on my blog:
The peak of this sequence is about 100X my normal traffic levels. Not quite what I’ve seen on the occasions I’ve been Fireballed, but close.
The feedback has been fascinating, and to everyone who emailed or commented in some way, thank you. There are a lot of people out there who are really uncomfortable with the disclosures that this study have brought to light; if I were Facebook, I’d be looking at this reaction and thinking that i have a problem of trust with many users that I would want to try to understand it and close the gap. The reaction from Facebook, unfortunately, really came across as one of those “I’m sorry if you were upset by what we did” non-apology, which I don’t think has helped people feel better about this.
There was a lot of great feedback disagreeing with me, and many of those who don’t agree with my view have some good points. One of the longer and most interesting was written by Robert Scoble, who posted it both to Facebook and to his Google+ account. Many of the things Robert brings up are things that aren’t high on my list of priorities — my family isn’t on Facebook, for instance so I don’t have to worry about that problem, and I don’t use Facebook’s identity or login setup, because I don’t like the idea of a breach of any one account giving hackers access to a wide swath of my online life (instead, I use an encrypted wallet — 1Password — and I’ve set up every account with unique, high quality passwords, which I manage across my devices using the wallet)
A few people, as usual, didn’t seem to read my note too closely (or at all) and argued positions I hadn’t actually taken. I got chastised a number of times for a kneejerk reaction on this, when if you’ll remember, I sat on it for a day and a half before posting anything, and delayed a final decision for a week to better evaluate this and see what new info was sure to come out. These people don’t seem to understand the term “final straw”, either, and didn’t seem to pick up on the rather important point that this is just a part of all of the things going on that led to me finally deciding I didn’t need Facebook any more.
But overall, the commentary was well thought out and surprisingly free of trolls, and that was great. I wasn’t trying to push people into any specific action, my hope was to raise the issues and get people to think about it. What you do after thinking about it is purely up to you.
As of right now — my thoughts haven’t changed. There have been a couple of apologies out of Facebook, none of them sounding particularly sincere to me; the ‘I’m sorry if you were upset over this’ non-apologies don’t help, folks. At this point, I doubt it will. I’ve been retweeting a bunch of stuff about this kerfluffle on my Twitter account, which if you don’t follow it, you probably should. If I have a primary social media ssytem these days, that’s it, and most of my activity funnels through it these days.
What matters here is not what I finally decide to do, but that it’s helped encourage discussion of what I feel is an important issue online — where are the lines to be drawn around what is ethical and what isn’t when it comes to manipulating what people see and trying to manage their behavior online. As more and more of us put more and more of our lives online into virtual environments, knowing you’re safe from dangerous manipulation and that you can trust what is being presented to you is relevant and minimally biased is going to be increasingly important to us.
It looks like this was a minor study of not very great importance, except that it both crossed a line between manipulating someone’s actions (“red buttons raise sales 5%”) into manipulating emotions, and that’s a very squishy area ethically. I’d be a lot less upset, I think, if the study had been well-thought-out, well designed, generated good data and actually helped us understand what was going on here. Instead, we had a company with no real internal controls, a psych review board that gave it a rubberstamp approval for really poor reasoning (and what Facebook did wasn’t what they told the review board anyway), poor data, statistically insignificant results with no real control to test again, and the project was designed using tools in ways they weren’t intended to be used. Other than that, as they say, it was perfect. Oh, yeah. company apologies that sound like ass covering more than apologies. That’s why I’m not a huge fan of Facebook right now, folks.
Were there lessons learned in this controversy?
I think so, yes. Unfortunately, right now, it seems the primary one for Facebook and other social sites like it is “Don’t publish” — which is the wrong answer, since this is all uncharted territory and we need to figure all this out. That Facebook brought this issue into the public view this way — with a poorly thought out and badly designed study that tweaks all of our buttons in bad ways — does a great disservice to that concept of sharing data and building standards of ethical behavior from that.
So I expect we’ll continue to exist in a virtual wild west for a while. Too bad.
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