“Recently the Data Science Team has begun to use its unique position to experiment with the way Facebook works, tweaking the site-the way scientists might prod an ant’s nest-to see how users react… So [Eytan Bakshy] messed with how Facebook operated for a quarter of a billion users. Over a seven-week period, the 76 million links that those users shared with each other were logged. Then, on 219 million randomly chosen occasions, Facebook prevented someone from seeing a link shared by a friend. Hiding links this way created a control group so that Bakshy could assess how often people end up promoting the same links because they have similar information sources and interests.
“He found that our close friends strongly sway which information we share, but overall their impact is dwarfed by the collective influence of numerous more distant contacts-what sociologists call “weak ties.” It is our diverse collection of weak ties that most powerfully determines what information we’re exposed to.”
But if that sounds a little creepy, it shouldn’t. Well, not too creepy, because these kinds of experiments aren’t designed to influence us, but rather understand us. The piece continues:
“Marlow says his team wants to divine the rules of online social life to understand what’s going on inside Facebook, not to develop ways to manipulate it. “Our goal is not to change the pattern of communication in society,” he says. “Our goal is to understand it so we can adapt our platform to give people the experience that they want.” But some of his team’s work and the attitudes of Facebook’s leaders show that the company is not above using its platform to tweak users’ behavior. Unlike academic social scientists, Facebook’s employees have a short path from an idea to an experiment on hundreds of millions of people.”
I think there is a lot of room to explore the world of weak ties on Facebook and similar websites. Just how much do friends of friends affect us? What is the impact of people a few ties along in our network? For example, the book Connected shows that traits like obesity and happiness are tied to network behavior which could be examined on Facebook.
I would guess some people may not like hearing this but there are at least three points in Facebook’s favor here:
1. They are not the only online company running such experiments. Google has been doing such things with search results for quite a while. Theoretically, these experiments could help create a better user experience.
2. People are voluntarily giving their data. I don’t think these companies have to explain that user’s data might be used in experiments…but perhaps I am wrong?
3. This is “Big Data” writ large. Facebook and others would love to be able to run randomized trials with this large group and with all of the information available to researchers.
Legally Sociable 