Stunning news flash from the world of commerce — corporations are trying to manipulate you and your emotions in order to get your money. More shocking still? Facebook psychologists and data scientists have purposely tweaked user new feeds to control their emotional response.
OMG, can you believe it? Well, duh.
Wall Street Journal, bless its manipulative money grubbing heart, has posted a blatant bit of rage-itorial detailing Facebook’s tentative forays in online psych experiments and the resulting (faux?) outrage.
“What many of us feared is already a reality: Facebook is using us as lab rats, and not just to figure out which ads we’ll respond to but actually change our emotions,” wrote Animalnewyork.com.
That said, roughly 700,000 Facebook customers unwittingly took part in the experiment back in 2012, which attempted to influence moods by adding and/or subtracting certain kinds of content from individual users’ news feeds.
An abstract of the study reads in part, “for people who had positive content reduced in their News Feed, a larger percentage of words in people’s status updates were negative and a smaller percentage were positive. When negativity was reduced, the opposite pattern occurred.”
Facebook: More Evil than Mom?
Not stunningly banal enough for you?
McDonald’s tweaks its recipes to encourage, nay, trick customers into enjoying more and eating more McDonald’s food. Shocking, I know, but it’s true — salt, sugar and fat are blended and reblended into ever tastier concoctions that you will pay to eat again and again.
And, it’s not just fast food, nope.
Yes, of course, Facebook, McDonald’s, Nike, General Electric, Whole Foods, Toyota, governments everywhere, mom & dad, etc use the tools available to make a better product, world, environment, mouse trap, textbook, etc…
Would you have it any other way?
Image: Joy of Tech