Facebook has come up with new guidelines for research on the platform, including “enhanced review process” by a special internal panel and training for online researchers. Critics say users should have been given the possibility to opt out.
Facebook changes real name policy, apologizes to LGBT community
Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer, Mike Schroepfer, promised in
a blogpost the company is going to be more
careful in hosting and conducting research.
The social network is thus responding to the June scandal, when
it was revealed researchers secretly manipulated posts being seen by nearly
700,000 Facebook users in early 2012 in order to see how their
emotions were affected.
The company is not going to give up on research, but says it
wants “to do it in the most responsible way.”
“Although this subject matter was important to research, we
were unprepared for the reaction the paper received when it was
published and have taken to heart the comments and
criticism,” Schroepfer wrote on Thursday. “It is clear
now that there are things we should have done differently.”
Researchers have been given “clearer guidelines” on how
to carry out their study at the social network, the Facebook’s
CTO says, without detailing the guidelines further.
He also says the company created an internal panel for reviewing
any research idea. There will be engineering, research, legal,
privacy and policy experts on the panel.
New Facebook engineers will be taught research practices as part
of their obligatory six-week training program.
The company has been praised for its attempt to regulate research
at the network, but experts would have liked to see it giving
users an opportunity to refuse participation in studies.
“Tightening up research practices is a step in the right
direction,” president of privacy watchdog group the
Electronic Privacy Information Center, Marc Rotenberg, told the
New York Times. “But human subject research requires consent
and independent review. It does not appear that Facebook has
taken those steps.”
Others experts in the field said an external panel for reviewing
the research would signal a more scientific approach and
generally said social networks still had a long way to go to
carry out research in appropriate way.
“These admirable steps make Facebook an industry leader in
conducting research responsibly,” James Grimmelmann, a law
professor at the University of Maryland told the Wall Street
Journal. “Unfortunately, Facebook is able to be an industry
leader only because the industry’s standards are so low.”
Other social networks have been less apologetic about their
online experiments than Facebook. The OkCupid dating network
admitted in July it conducted several
experiments on its users and said it was not sorry.
“But guess what, everybody: if you use the internet, you’re
the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on
every site. That’s how websites work,” website’s co-founder
Christian Rudder wrote back then.