Manipulação de opiniões no Facebook... Manipulação?

Primeiro uma breve contextualização sobre o assunto.

Em meados de setembro/outubro do ano passado alguns pesquisadores ligados à Google fizeram um estudo relativo ao contágio de sentimentos através das redes sociais usando informações do próprio Facebook.

Aqui está o abstract do artigo:

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.

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.

Em suma: O Facebook propositalmente testou em pouco mais de 700 mil usuários o efeito do contágio de sentimentos através da ‘supressão ou adição de informações’ na linha do tempo desses usuários.

Houve uma grande polêmica em torno do assunto, inclusive até os editores emitiram uma nota esclarecendo alguns aspectos do estudo, e houve a mesma reclamação de sempre.

Com esse plano de fundo, no blog do Andrew Gelman foi escrito um post interessante sobre a questão e se essas reclamações são justificáveis ou não, e a resposta é categórica:

[…] It seems a bit ridiculous to say that a researcher needs special permission to do some small alteration of an internet feed, when advertisers and TV networks can broadcast all sorts of emotionally affecting images whenever they want. The other thing that’s bugging me is the whole IRB thing, the whole ridiculous idea that if you’re doing research you need to do permission for noninvasive things like asking someone a survey question.[…]

[…]So, do I consider this Facebook experiment unethical? No, but I could see how it could be considered thus, in which case you’d also have to consider all sorts of non-research experiments (the famous A/B testing that’s so popular now in industry) to be unethical as well. In all these cases, you have researchers, of one sort or another, experimenting on people to see their reactions. And I don’t see the goal of getting published in PNAS to be so much worse than the goal of making money by selling more ads.[…]

[…]Again, I can respect if you take a Stallman-like position here (or, at least, what I imagine rms would say) and argue that all of these manipulations are unethical, that the code should be open and we should all be able to know, at least in principle, how our messages are being filtered. So I agree that there is an ethical issue here and I respect those who have a different take on it than I do—but I don’t see the advantage of involving institutional review boards here. All sorts of things are unethical but still legal, and I don’t see why doing something and publishing it in a scientific journal should be considered more unethical or held to a more stringent standard than doing the same thing and publishing it in an internal business report.[…]

Em outras palavras: Não adianta a critica ao que o Facebook fez se de uma maneira ou de outra a propaganda/publicidade/marketing vem fazendo isso a anos. Não é porque alguém publica em um periódico acadêmico que faz ele menos “ético”(cabe ao juízo de valor de cada um) de quem faz isso internamente através de relatórios.

Nota Pessoal: Como ‘insider’ do mundo do crédito, produtos bancários não padronizados, e localização eu recomendo que a paranóia nada ajuda nestes casos. Hoje com um CEP preenchido em algum formulário para se ganhar um desconto em alguma coisa e o CPF qualquer pessoa pode ser localizada no Brasil; e as empresas de cartão de crédito sabem muito sobre nós todos.

Privacidade hoje só existe em dois lugares: Mídias não estruturadas  (e.g. cadernos, post it, anotações espúrias, etc); ou para terroristas e demais membros de organizações criminosas que não possuem nenhum traço no meio digital e só realizam transações off-market (e.g. contrabando, tráfico de drogas, fluxo de armas para terroristas, etc.) .