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Elijah Meeks, Jason Heppler, and Paul Zenke are joined by special guest Scott Weingart to discuss data science, Facebook's emotional contagion study, natural language processing, research ethics, computational social science, and social media literacy.
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Show Notes
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i am – the scottbot irregular Scott Weingart's website.
Data science is the study of the generalizable extraction of knowledge from data, yet the key word is science. It incorporates varying elements and builds on techniques and theories from many fields, including signal processing, mathematics, probability models, machine learning, statistical learning, computer programming, data engineering, pattern recognition and learning, visualization, uncertainty modeling, data warehousing, and high performance computing with the goal of extracting meaning from data and creating data products.
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.
Meaning Facebook caused users to feel better or worse at random, but on purpose. So instead of allowing for natural balance (seeing both good and bad posts) this “experiment” limited some peoples feeds to showing more good, or more bad. That actually does have a f***ing impact on people.
It is unimaginable that a pharmaceutical firm would be allowed to randomly, secretly sneak an experimental drug, no matter how mild, into the drinks of hundreds of thousands of people, just to see what happens, without ever telling those people. Imagine a pharmaceutical researcher saying, “I was only looking at a narrow research question, so I don’t know if my drug harmed anyone, and I haven’t bothered to find out.” Unfortunately, this seems to be an acceptable attitude when it comes to experimenting with people over social networks. It needs to change.
Emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. Emotional contagion is well established in laboratory experiments, with people transferring positive and negative emotions to others. Data from a large real-world social network, collected over a 20-y period suggests that longer-lasting moods (e.g., depression, happiness) can be transferred through networks [Fowler JH, Christakis NA (2008) BMJ 337:a2338], although the results are controversial. In an experiment with people who use Facebook, we test whether emotional contagion occurs outside of in-person interaction between individuals by reducing the amount of emotional content in the News Feed. When positive expressions were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts; when negative expressions were reduced, the opposite pattern occurred. These results indicate that emotions expressed by others on Facebook influence our own emotions, constituting experimental evidence for massive-scale contagion via social networks. This work also suggests that, in contrast to prevailing assumptions, in-person interaction and nonverbal cues are not strictly necessary for emotional contagion, and that the observation of others’ positive experiences constitutes a positive experience for people.
This post rolls up all of the major primary sources for the Facebook emotional manipulation study, along with selected news and commentary.
I’m glad this study has prompted an intense debate among scholars and the public, but I fear it’s turned into a simplistic attack on Facebook over this particular study, rather than a nuanced debate over how we create meaningful ethical oversight in research and practice. The lines between research and practice are always blurred and information companies like Facebook make this increasingly salient. No one benefits by drawing lines in the sand. We need to address the problem more holistically. And, in the meantime, we need to hold companies accountable for how they manipulate people across the board, regardless of whether or not it’s couched as research. If we focus too much on this study, we’ll lose track of the broader issues at stake.
So the true creep-out in Facebook’s study isn’t about research ethics or Skinner boxes; it’s about ownership of space. The “emotional contagion” study dramatically rips off a curtain that separated Facebook’s public face and its backstage. Publicly, Facebook woos us with a vision of a social information stream shaped by our individual needs and networks; backstage, the folks behind the curtain are pulling levers to find more efficient ways to hijack our attention and sell us stuff.
The closest any of us who might have participated in Facebook’s huge social engineering study came to actually consenting to participate was signing up for the service. Facebook’s Data Use Policy warns users that Facebook “may use the information we receive about you…for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.” This has led to charges that the study violated laws designed to protect human research subjects. But it turns out that those laws don’t apply to the study, and even if they did, it could have been approved, perhaps with some tweaks. Why this is the case requires a bit of explanation.
This split reaction I think shows a clash of different ways the study is framed, which points to the larger issue how we should frame and regulate private entities engaging in scientific research – and even more fundamentally, how to frame and regulate digital entrants to existing social fields. But before we get to that, for the non-academics, let’s quickly review the facts what exactly makes academics irate about the study.
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Natural language processing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Natural language processing (NLP) is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. As such, NLP is related to the area of human–computer interaction.
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@TedUnderwood on Twitter Using machine learning to understand 19th-century print culture at the U of Illinois. Day job as a romanticist. Author of Why Literary Periods Mattered.
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The Digital Humanists’ (Lack of) Response to the Surveillance State | Manuscripts and Machines
A critically-engaged, ethical digital humanities demands that practitioners teach, discuss, and research those areas of life where they are most well-positioned to have an impact, to explain things in new ways, or to provide resources for students, colleagues, and the public so that they can understand and respond to the US government's actions, which I would argue are both misguided and paranoid. While I see my peers doing fascinating work on literature, maps, data visualization, and the entire vibrant range of projects in which we are collectively engaged, I worry that too few have heard the implicit call to put their expertise in service of educating others about the extent of the NSA and other agency's activities and—most importantly—about the history, meaning, and possible futures of these oppressive and chilling activities.
An institutional review board (IRB), also known as an independent ethics committee or ethical review board, is a committee that has been formally designated to approve, monitor, and review biomedical and behavioral research involving humans. They often conduct some form of risk-benefit analysis in an attempt to determine whether or not research should be done.[1] The number one priority of IRBs is to protect human subjects from physical or psychological harm. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Department of Health and Human Services (specifically Office for Human Research Protections) regulations have empowered IRBs to approve, require modifications in planned research prior to approval, or disapprove research. IRBs are responsible for critical oversight functions for research conducted on human subjects that are "scientific," "ethical," and "regulatory."
Facebook has just announced that it's buying Oculus Rift for $2 billion. Seriously. "Mobile is the platform of today, and now we're also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow," Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says. "Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate."
Citation analysis is the examination of the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in articles and books.[1][2] It uses citations in scholarly works to establish links to other works or other researchers.[3] Citation analysis is one of the most widely used methods of bibliometrics. For example, bibliographic coupling and co-citation are association measures based on citation analysis (shared citations or shared references).
I do not like to write about myself, and I do not like to write about my pain. Today Jacobin put me in a position where I had no choice but to do that.
The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it? “Choose the former,” writes Rushkoff, “and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.”
OkTrends is original research and insights from OkCupid. We've compiled our observations and statistics from hundreds of millions of OkCupid user interactions, all to explore the data side of the online world.
A study of millions of Facebook users on Election Day 2010 has found that online social networks can have a measurable if limited effect on voter turnout.
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The Stone and the Shell | Historical questions raised by a quantitative approach to language Ted Underwood's website.
Why should Zuckerberg get to decide how you feel? Take back control. Leverage Facebook's own research to manipulate your emotions on your terms. Try the FB Mood Manipulator now!
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Facebook these days A comic.
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Explore Teach and learn digital skills and web literacy. The pages in this section are full of fun things to discover, make and teach. Our global community is continually adding new activities, lesson plans and tutorials from across the web that make it easy to learn by doing. Anyone can use these educational resources—they’re free, open and backed by Mozilla’s non-profit mission.
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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
PNAS is one of the world's most-cited multidisciplinary scientific serials. Since its establishment in 1914, it continues to publish cutting-edge research reports, commentaries, reviews, perspectives, colloquium papers, and actions of the Academy.
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OK so. A lot of people have asked me about my... - Adam D. I. Kramer
I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety.
The impact factor (IF) of an academic journal is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to recent articles published in the journal.
Writer on politics, economy, media. Columnist for @AJEnglish. Researcher on Central Asia. Recovering academic
This Statement of Rights and Responsibilities ("Statement," "Terms," or "SRR") derives from the Facebook Principles, and is our terms of service that governs our relationship with users and others who interact with Facebook. By using or accessing Facebook, you agree to this Statement, as updated from time to time in accordance with Section 14 below. Additionally, you will find resources at the end of this document that help you understand how Facebook works.
ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World reconstructs the time cost and financial expense associated with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity. The model is based on a simplified version of the giant network of cities, roads, rivers and sea lanes that framed movement across the Roman Empire. It broadly reflects conditions around 200 CE but also covers a few sites and roads created in late antiquity.
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Milgram experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963 in an article published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and later discussed his findings in greater depth in his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View.
Data mining, an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science, is the computational process of discovering patterns in large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, and database systems.
Jon Michael Kleinberg (born October 1971) is an American computer scientist and the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University known for his work in algorithms and networks.
Unobtrusive research (or unobtrusive measures) is a method of data collection used primarily in the social sciences. The term "unobtrusive measures" was first coined by Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, & Sechrest in a 1966 book titled Unobtrusive Measures: nonreactive research in the social sciences.
The First Draft theme song. (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Thanks for listening.
