Almost all of my spare time is spent on social media – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. It’s my way to connect with the outside world from the comfort of my home. Recently it was revealed by Andrew Ledvina, a data scientist at Facebook that from 2012-2014 these data scientist were allowed to run emotion manipulation studies. As a way to defend himself Mr. Ledvina’s published his viewpoints in the blog “10 Ways Facebook is Actually the Devil” as he said his words were taken out of context when talking to the reporter from the Wall Street Journal. If you are a person who spends most of your time on social media take the time to read the Forbes article “Ex-Facebook Data Scientist: Every Facebook User Is Part Of An Experiment At Some Point.”

The Forbes article points out some of Ledvina’s viewpoints, “The fundamental purpose of most people at Facebook working on data is to influence and alter people’s moods and behavior. They are doing it all the time to make you like stories more, to click on more ads, to spend more time on the site. This is just how a website works, everyone does this and everyone knows that everyone does this, I don’t see why people are all up in arms over this thing all of a sudden.”

I’m not one to notice how my newsfeed is set-up or how items are delivered to me in the feeds however I will be more aware in the future by watching which friends post are revealed and which advertisements are shown to me.

Photo credit: www.livescience.com