Facebook's experiment on over half-a-million unsuspecting users has taken a new twist with the revelation that a researcher connected to a Department of Defense-funded program to use the military to quell civil unrest also participated in the study.
Social media sites exploded over the weekend after it was
revealed that Facebook, no stranger to controversy of late,
secretly manipulated posts being seen by nearly 700,000 users in
2012 in order to allow researchers to study how emotional states
are transmitted over the platform.
Results of the week-long study conducted by researchers at
Facebook, Cornell University, and the University of California
appeared in the June edition of the journal 'Proceedings of the
National Academy of Scientists' (PNAS) under the rather insidious
title, ‘Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional
contagion through social networks’.
Facebook altered the content that showed up on certain
users’ news feeds to control the number of posts that contained
words with positively or negatively charged emotions.
The team concluded its federally funded study by saying that
“emotions spread via contagion through a network.”
When word hit the internet that Facebook was essentially
conducting Orwellian thought policing, an electronic outpouring
of condemnation greeted the company that Mark Zuckerberg built.
One of the study’s authors, Adam Kramer, took to his own Facebook account to offer
more of an explanation than an apology for the secret study.
“We felt that it was important to investigate the common
worry that seeing friends post positive content leads to people
feeling negative or left out,” Kramer said. “At the same
time, we were concerned that exposure to friends' negativity
might lead people to avoid visiting Facebook. We didn't clearly
state our motivations in the paper.”
The attack on Facebook looks set to worsen as it was discovered
that one of the authors of the platform’s mind study, Jeffrey T.
Hancock of Cornell University, also received funding from the
Pentagon’s so-called Minerva Research Initiative to conduct a
similar study entitled ‘Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in
Authoritarian Regimes’.
The Pentagon-funded Minerva program provides cash awards to
everyone from “single investigators to large multi-university
consortia,” according to its website and includes
“researchers from 32 academic institutions, including six
non-US universities and four industry or non-profit
organizations.”
The program will disperse around six million dollars in 2014 and
$17 million over the next three years.
Hancock’s
description page at Cornell University cites
“psychological and interpersonal dynamics of social media,
deception, and language” as his research and academic
interests.
Hancock’s study appeared in 2009, one year before the US Army War
College’s Strategic Institute warned in a different study, and in
the wake of the global financial meltdown, that the United States
could experience massive civil unrest from a series of crises it
termed “strategic shock.”
UK Data Protection Watchdog Probes Legality Of Facebook's Emotion Study http://t.co/iuZF89M3cQ by @riptari
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) July 2, 2014
The report, which carried the Rumsfeldian title, ‘Known Unknowns: Unconventional Strategic Shocks in Defense Strategy Development’, suggested that the military may have to be called in to restore domestic order in the event of a massive social breakdown.
“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would
force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in
extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,”
the report, authored by [Ret.] Lt. Col. Nathan Freir, states.
Meanwhile, Cornell University participated in another study under
the Minerva Research Initiative (and supervised by the US Air
Force Office of Scientific Research) that looks to predict
“the dynamics of social movement mobilization and
contagions."
The project hopes to foresee "the critical mass [tipping
point]" of social unrest and upheaval by studying their
"digital traces" from a number of recent events,
including the 2011 Egyptian revolution and the 2013 Gezi Park
protests in Turkey.
At the same time, Twitter feeds and conversations will be
examined "to identify individuals mobilized in a social
contagion and when they become mobilized."
Facebook apologizes after psychological experiment caused outrage
Coming so soon after the Snowden leaks, the idea of a researcher
closely affiliated with a Pentagon study now secretly examining
the behavior of Facebook users under ‘controlled conditions’ is
certainly cause for alarm.
This latest scandal also speaks volumes about the disturbing
frequency of US educational facilities cooperating so directly
with military programs that do not appear to have the best
interests of the civil society at the core of their actions.